Resilient Spirit
Artwork by Steve Gleason | 2024
Created by Steve Gleason in 2024, these works are part of “Resilient Spirit,” a collection exploring determination, limitation, creativity, and the human drive to express what exists within us.
Reaching Out to Catch the Sun’s Rays
By Steve Gleason
No Tree Can Grow to Heaven, Unless Its Roots Reach to Hell
By Steve Gleason
Gleason created the collection using Adobe Firefly generative AI and custom eye-tracking technology. Through his eye movements, Gleason could develop text prompts that guided the creation of the images—transforming ideas, memories, emotions, and artistic direction into visual form. Adobe also worked with Gleason to incorporate elements of his original hand-drawn artwork into the creative process.
Before ALS affected his ability to move, Gleason was an avid artist who filled sketchbooks with graphite drawings. The technology behind Resilient Spirit gave him a new way to return to visual art. As Gleason described the possibilities of this technology, “The only limit is our collective imagination.”
The two works displayed in the Team Gleason Ochsner Assistive Technology Lab are Reaching Out to Catch the Sun’s Rays and No Tree Can Grow to Heaven, Unless Its Roots Reach to Hell.
In No Tree Can Grow to Heaven, Unless Its Roots Reach to Hell—named for Gleason’s prompt for the piece—a solitary tree bridges two dramatically different worlds. Its roots reach deep into fiery orange and yellow earth while its trunk and crown rise toward a luminous, dreamlike sky. The image evokes the tension at the center of Resilient Spirit: struggle and possibility, darkness and light, roots and growth.
In Reaching Out to Catch the Sun’s Rays, a lone figure stands amid a swirling, richly saturated landscape, reaching toward a brilliant sun. Waves of blue, turquoise, gold, and orange surround the figure, creating a sense of movement and energy. The work visually echoes the John Muir quotation incorporated into the piece: “Rivers flow not past, but through us; tingling, vibrating, exciting every cell and fiber in our bodies, making them sing and glide.”
These works carry particular meaning in the Team Gleason Ochsner Assistive Technology Lab. They demonstrate an idea at the heart of the Lab and Team Gleason’s mission: technology can do more than compensate for physical limitations. It can create new pathways for independence, communication, creativity, purpose, and contribution.
Resilient Spirit invites us to reconsider what accessibility can make possible. Assistive technology does not create the ideas or imagination—it provides another way for the person behind them to bring those ideas into the world.
The original Resilient Spirit exhibition featured seven works and debuted in New Orleans in 2024.
