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Finnegan Shannon

They // Them // Theirs

Artist

Brooklyn, New York

Finnegan, a white person with close-cropped hair, wears a multi-patterned, asymmetrical button-up shirt and gives a reserved smile.

Photo by Sylvie Rosokoff.

“My art practice is a series of access experiments. Instead of focusing on compliance and doing the minimum, what if we approach access creatively and attentively, centering disability cultures?”

Finnegan Shannon (b. 1989, Berkeley, CA) is an artist experimenting with forms of access. Some of their recent work includes Alt Text as Poetry, a collaboration with Bojana Coklyat that explores the expressive potential of image description; Do You Want Us Here or Not, a series of benches and cushions designed for exhibition spaces; and Don’t mind if I do, a conveyor-belt-centered exhibition that prioritizes rest and play. They have done projects with MUDAM Luxembourg, the Queens Museum, moCa Cleveland, the High Line, MMK Frankfurt, MCA Denver, and Nook Gallery. Their work has been supported by a Wynn Newhouse Award, an Eyebeam fellowship, a Disability Futures Fellowship, and grants from Art Matters Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Disability Visibility Project. Their work has been written about in Art in America, BOMB Magazine, the Believer, and Out Magazine. They live and work in Brooklyn, NY.

Donor -The 2025 USA Fellow award was generously supported by Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Disability Futures is supported by Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation.

This artist page was last updated on: 01.30.2025

Visual Art Architecture & Design
A rectangular conveyor belt rotates colorful and tactile works of art around a rectangular gallery space to different comfortable looking mismatched chairs. Text on the wall reads “We sit and enjoy don't mind if we do we links in a chain we flowing we looping…”

Don’t mind if I do by Finnegan Shannon with Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Pelenakeke Brown, Sky Cubacub, Emilie L. Gossiaux, Felicia Griffin, Joselia Rebekah Hughes, and Jeff Kasper, 2023, moCa Cleveland.

Photo by Jacob Koestler.

A wooden staircase blocked off by an orange chain and a sign in printed handwriting that reads "If you would like to use the stairs ask gallery staff. Elevators are for use" with an icon of a crossed-out staircase.

Inside joke between me and everyone who has had to make an access request by Finnegan Shannon, 2023. FLAG Art Foundation, New York.

Photo by Steven Probert.

A screen stretched across many floors of scaffolding depicts a picture of a white person's hand holding a tissue box embroidered to look like a little house. The tissues stick out from the house's chimney, like puffs of smoke.

Hello from my bedside table by Finnegan Shannon, 2022. A banner commissioned for the temporary construction scaffolding of the Kunsthalle. Kunsthalle Osnabrück.

Photo by Angela von Brill.