There are exhibitions you visit and leave behind.
And then there are those that stay with you, quietly rearranging the way you look at the world.
That was my experience at the Palais de Tokyo with Normes Corps, a season of exhibitions exploring vulnerability, disability, bodies and the invisible standards that define what we consider “normal.”
Among the artists presented, I was particularly struck by Cheryl Marie Wade, an American poet, performer and disability activist whose work felt both deeply personal and unexpectedly universal.
Known as “The Queen-Mother of Gnarly,” Wade (1948–2013) developed a body of work made of poems, songs and one-woman performances. Her work emerged from women’s discussion and theatre groups before moving onto stages and, later, into video as her health made performing increasingly difficult.
She became part of the disability arts scene that emerged in Berkeley in the late 1970s, alongside the development of Disability Studies.
What makes the exhibition particularly moving is that we don't simply encounter Cheryl through finished artworks. We encounter her through fragments of an unfinished documentary.
The footage was originally filmed by French director Diane Maroger in the early 2000s, with the intention of making a television documentary about Wade and the disabled community around her in California.
The project was eventually abandoned by the producer.More than twenty years later, those images have found another life at the Palais de Tokyo.
The exhibition almost feels like stepping into a film that never got its ending. We see Cheryl at home, performing, talking, laughing, reflecting.
We are given glimpses rather than a perfectly constructed portrait. And perhaps that is what makes it so powerful.
One of the things that stayed with me was Cheryl's relationship with anger.
Not the kind of anger we are usually encouraged to hide. The useful kind. The kind that tells you something is wrong. She understood anger as something that could move people, create resistance and even become liberating when brought onto the stage.
Instead of softening her experience to make other people comfortable, she transformed it into poetry, humour, music and performance.
There was something incredibly alive in that. We often talk about positive thinking as if difficult emotions were obstacles to overcome as quickly as possible.
But Cheryl seemed to understand something different: anger can contain information. "Anger can fuel revolutions". It can tell us where a boundary has been crossed. It can tell us what we can no longer accept. And sometimes, it can give us the energy to move.
The exhibition also made me think about something that goes beyond disability: the experience of becoming invisible.
Cheryl spoke about what it feels like when people don't really see you anymore — even people who are supposed to know you.
Not being listened to.
Not being understood.
Being treated as an inconvenience.
Being made to feel that your presence takes up too much space.
Her stories made me think about how familiar this feeling can be, even outside the context of disability.
The child who feels like the outsider in their own family.
The teenager who doesn't fit into the group.
The person who is judged because of their appearance.
The one who is too sensitive, too loud, too quiet, too different.
The body that doesn't fit the expected shape.
The personality that doesn't behave according to the rules.
Different circumstances, but sometimes the same underlying wound: the feeling that there is something wrong with you because you don't fit the space you have been given.
This is where Cheryl's work becomes much bigger than a story about disability. It becomes a story about belonging.
One of the most striking things about Cheryl's story is how often the obstacle wasn't simply her body.
It was the environment around it.
A staircase.
An inaccessible building.
A social expectation.
A stranger's discomfort.
A system designed around a very specific idea of what a body should be able to do.
The Palais de Tokyo describes this through the concept of ableism: a system that creates a hierarchy between bodies considered “normal” and those perceived as outside the norm.
The exhibition asks us to question a culture built around performance, speed, productivity and independence — and to consider instead interdependence, attention, difference and vulnerability. That distinction stayed with me.
Because accessibility is not only about ramps and elevators.
It is also about asking: Who was this space designed for?
And perhaps even more importantly: Who was it designed without?
For Cheryl, Berkeley became an important turning point.
After years of struggling with disability and finding her place within educational institutions, she eventually studied at UC Berkeley and became involved in the emerging disability rights and arts community there.
She found spaces where disabled people could organize, create, perform and speak for themselves. There is something beautiful about that transition. Not because Berkeley magically solved everything. But because she found a place where she didn't have to constantly explain her existence. A place where her wheelchair wasn't the most interesting thing about her.
Her voice was.
Her humour was.
Her creativity was.
Her anger was.
Her desire to live fully was.
And she used all of it.
Perhaps this is what I took away most from Cheryl's story.
Not a message about overcoming disability.
Not a story about becoming “strong despite” her body.
Something much more interesting: a refusal to wait for the world to become comfortable before taking up space in it.
She performed.
She wrote.
She sang.
She made people uncomfortable.
She made people laugh.
She challenged authority.
She built community.
She reclaimed language that had been used against disabled people and helped transform it into a source of identity and pride.
And she did it with humour and a kind of unapologetic lightness. That, to me, is where her work feels especially contemporary.
We live in a time obsessed with optimization: becoming more productive, more attractive, more efficient, more successful, more disciplined.
But what if the question isn't always “How can I become better?”
What if sometimes it is: “Who decided what better looks like?”
Cheryl Marie Wade spent much of her life questioning that assumption.
And perhaps that is why her work still feels so alive.
She reminds us that freedom doesn't necessarily mean having a perfect body, a perfect life or complete independence.
Sometimes freedom begins much earlier.
With refusing to disappear.
With allowing yourself to be seen.
With finding your people.
With making art out of what was once meant to silence you.
With taking up space — exactly as you are.
And maybe, every once in a while, with a little bit of juice.