About Max

Max grew up in both the San Francisco Bay Area and Humboldt County in northern California, though he calls the latter his home. After high school, he left home to attend UC Davis and spent the next twelve years bouncing around the Sacramento area. While he had a rough start with college, he eventually found his place in the online Disability Studies BA program at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Professional Studies. He graduated with his bachelor’s in 2025 and made the decision to settle down back in his hometown in the redwoods to figure out what’s next for him. Now closer to his family and friends, he is taking this time to focus on the thing that has consistently brought him the most joy throughout his life: creating art.

Max has a neuromuscular disability called spinal muscular atrophy. As he got older, he got bigger, and his disabled muscles struggled to support his growing bones. Doctors fused his spine twice, resulting in a still-curvy but virtually unbreakable column of vertibrae and titanium. His body twisted and folded around that column and settled into a shape that looks far less comfortable than it feels. Curled like a piece of bacon, angular like a bolt of lightning, his shape is certainly “less than typical”. His disabled body doesn’t fit easily in any chair that isn’t his own. His wheelchair doesn’t fit easily in homes or public spaces. His autistic brain doesn’t fit easily in academia or the workforce. Even his gender doesn’t fit easily in any of the boxes he’d be expected to check. From day one, the world around him has had one very clear message for him:

He’s the wrong shape.

And there's no other shape he'd rather be.

Max is perfectly Max-shaped. His wheelchair is bright, his nails are painted, his style is his own. He is who he is and does what he does not in spite of his shape but because of it.

In Max's art, you’ll see the skills he’s honed over three decades of practice, both self-taught and formally learned. But behind each pencil line and paintbrush stroke is disabled ingenuity—in his studio, he is constantly adapting, using his creativity in pursuit of his creativity, coming up with new and better ways to work with his increasingly wrong shape.

Wrong Shape Studio is the culmination of this.