SAN DIEGO — What do Beethoven, Monet, Van Gogh, Baudelaire, Kahlo, Plath and Hockney have in common? If you called them titans of art, music and literature, you’d be right. Here’s one more feature: they all created masterpieces through, or with, their disabilities.

Two artists from the list above were deaf, one went blind, one was critically injured in a bus accident, others faced mental and physical issues, ranging from syphilis to psychotic episodes.

How people use art to process and understand disability, and how people use disability as a theme, a filter and a subject in art, is the focus of an exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art that runs through Feb. 2.

“For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability” zeroes in on works from the 1960s through the COVID-19 pandemic and touches upon all sorts of deviations from health and wellness, including acute illness, hospitalization, car accidents, the AIDS epidemic, mental illnesses, substance abuse and chronic conditions. It features more than 80 artists, including some who worked or taught in San Diego: sculptor and painter Niki de Saint Phalle, performance artist James Luna and professor and composer Pauline Oliveros.

Jill Dawsey, the museum’s senior curator, said the exhibition draws context from its surroundings, with San Diego as a life-science community, and a medical research and health care hub — and neighboring Tijuana as a destination for medical tourism. But, she added, “it’s also important to emphasize that it’s a historical show, in the sense that it looks backward, all the way to the 1960s, and is trying to tell this much larger story about American art and these themes.”

A 1975 lithograph, by Morris Broderson, shows a man listening to a flower; he was deaf and studied at the California School for the Deaf; Hannah Wilke put watercolor and ink flowers on hospital pillowcases while she got treatment for lymphoma in New York City in 1992. She died a year later. Both works draw connections between nature, transformation and the senses.

Other show themes include how illness, disability and interactions with the health care system influence an artist’s technique, preoccupations and politics; how disability brings artists into new communities; how disability serves as a vehicle for exposing, investigating or celebrating other kinds of “otherness,” and how artists have sought healing through different pathways, including medicine, alternative therapies and art itself.

A simpler take: everyone at some point is off peak form, so disability is something every human can relate to in some way. If we don’t talk about disability, it’s due to stigma. Not irrelevance.

The show drew a robust crowd on a recent Sunday morning, in part because the museum is free on the second Sunday of every month. (Admission also is waived the third Thursday.) The event also drew visitors from the nearby La Jolla Christmas Parade & Holiday Festival.

“As a dancer and a dance educator, I just — over the years our bodies shift and the abilities shift, so that one was just really impactful. Seeing the gratitude for the movement that you can still have, as small as a finger,” said Christine Rudy-Reed, of San Diego. “I don’t have other words for it right now, because I’m still thinking about it. Still processing.”

The work that so moved her is “Hand Movie,” a 1966 8mm silent film by Yvonne Rainer. “I was very ill, but I could move my hand,” the artist is quoted, in a wall label affixed next to the movie. The film shows just her hand moving against a nondescript background. The context, unstated, is that she filmed it confined to a hospital bed after surgery. Rainer was a dancer and choreographer and turned to film as a different form of creative expression.

Rudy-Reed came for the free admission and because of the parade. She wasn’t seeking out these works or theme, but she had strong feelings after viewing the works.

“Art has a way of finding us, and this was serendipitous,” she said.

Arlene Hauser, of San Diego, said the mood of the works together was not uplifting but was good fodder for reflection.

“I’m so grateful that I don’t have health issues because it’s horrible to have to deal with this. So it makes you appreciate your good health,” Hauser said.

With this show, the museum took steps to make pieces more accessible. Works are hung lower. It’s not a glaring difference, but a change that can help people who are shorter or in wheelchairs, without taking away from the experience of taller visitors. It is also using an app called Bloomberg Connects, which has a read-aloud feature that allows vision-impaired people to hear artwork labels. Space has been set aside for a calm room, which is designed for visitors who experience sensory overload or need a quiet area to recenter.

Shortly before the show closes on Feb. 2, the museum will host an off-site screening of “Compensation,” an indie film described as “groundbreaking” by Janus Films, about the struggles of deaf African Americans, produced by UC San Diego professor Zeinabu irene Davis and starring deaf actors.

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