This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on the art world’s expanded view of what art is and who can make it.

It was 2:15 on a late-summer Friday afternoon, time for Creative Growth’s weekly dance party. The artists gathered in the lunch area and began gyrating to tunes from a boom box. Soon, a conga line formed. Chugging along, they snaked their way through their work spaces, then out the front door and back, synchronicity more evident in happy faces than footwork. It was a joyous way to celebrate another week of artistry.

Creative Growth is a sprawling art center and gallery near downtown Oakland in a building long ago converted from an auto repair shop. Far more than the dancing on Fridays, what happens here every day is a celebration — of art, of life, of the human spirit. It’s foremost a tribute to the mystery and marvel of the brain’s capacity to overcome deficits and, through artistic endeavor, open a window onto an inner self.

The artists here have intellectual and developmental disabilities, some with autism, some with Down syndrome, some nonverbal, some blind, some deaf and many who communicate better through the work they produce. Untrained in the conventional sense of art schools and mentors, they respond, instead, to an inexplicable force that guides their eyes, hands and instincts.

Monica Valentine, 68, originally from San Mateo, Calif., whose creations have reached museums around the country, slides beads onto pins, then inserts the pins into Styrofoam blocks, careful to somehow keep color groups in specific design patterns. How does she do that; she has been blind since birth. “I feel their temperature,” she says of the beads.

John Martin, 60, born in Marks, Miss., who lives with a complex developmental disability, molds ceramic pieces into what appear to be colorful everyday objects like pliers, wrenches and keys, only some of them have faces.

Like Ms. Valentine and Mr. Martin, who both now live in Oakland, each artist creates according to a particular muse with no outside instruction. As many as 90 artists a day, five days a week, immerse themselves in media of their choice — painting, drawing, sculpting, weaving, sewing, woodwork, beadwork, ceramics, video. For most of them, it’s their job; some have been coming here for decades.

While many of the finished pieces get only as far as an exhibition in the center’s own gallery, some artists have achieved international acclaim, their works regarded as on par with those by artists without disabilities and with more formal training. Pieces by Creative Growth stars — Judith Scott, Dan Miller and William Scott (no relation to Judith), among them — are eagerly sought by private collectors and leading gallerists. Some of their pieces sell in upper five figures.

They and other Creative Growth artists are also part of major museum collections, including the Pompidou Center in Paris, the National Gallery in Washington and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The State Department has secured on loan 100 pieces to display in American embassies around the world as part of its Arts in Embassies program.

On most days, Creative Growth artists’ works are on public view somewhere in the United States. In addition to the center’s gallery, their works are now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore through June 30; Sargent’s Daughters West in Los Angeles through Oct. 28; the largest current exhibition, at the Oakland Museum of California through Jan. 21; and the Outsider Art Fair in New York, Feb. 29 through March 3.

The Oakland show, “Into the Brightness,” is a presentation of nearly 300 artists working at Creative Growth and its two Bay Area sister organizations, Creativity Explored in San Francisco and NIAD (Nurturing Independence Through Artistic Development) in nearby Richmond. All three were founded as nonprofits by the late Elias Katz, a Bay Area psychologist, and his artist wife, Florence Ludins-Katz, who pushed to expand rights and quality of life for disabled people through art as an essential human experience. Creative Growth was the first to open in 1974, followed by the others in the early 1980s.

While all three studios share the same mission, Creative Growth has been the most aggressive in promoting artists beyond the region with an expectation they will be appreciated — and sold — more for the quality of the work than for the disability of the artist, much as Frida Kahlo’s paintings are revered for their brilliance and imagery, not the ill health she suffered much of her life. (She died at age 44 as a result of injuries from a streetcar accident when she was 18).

It’s a critical distinction that helps move disabled artists closer to the contemporary art mainstream, mirroring the experience of other minority groups, whose early works might have been venerated more because of the demographic of the artist.

“What you lead with matters,” said Tom DiMaria, Creative Growth’s director since 2000 and chief marketer. “If it’s the art that interests you, then the conversation is first about who made it and the story behind it. If disability leads, then it’s a charity case.”

The public will soon have a big opportunity to contemplate the difference. Starting April 6 and continuing into October, SFMOMA will celebrate Creative Growth’s 50th anniversary with a major exhibition of 113 pieces by 10 Creative Growth artists, all but two of them still working; Judith Scott died in 2005, Dwight Mackintosh in 1999.

Unlike the Oakland museum, which is buying 20 pieces for its own collection and returning the others, SFMOMA has purchased the entire Creative Growth exhibit, plus an additional 43 pieces from Creativity Explored and NIAD, for $578,000, the largest acquisition of works by disabled artists by any American museum. The museum is dedicating three galleries to the Creative Growth show with all the works remaining in SFMOMA’s permanent collection for inclusion in future exhibits.

The genesis of the Creative Growth exhibition came last year through an “open letter” on Instagram from Matthew Higgs, director of White Columns, New York’s oldest gallery for alternative art, to Christopher Bedford, then the newly-installed director of SFMOMA.

Mr. Bedford had served the previous six years as director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, where he campaigned for greater diversity on the walls and staff through de-accessioning older works. In his boldest effort, he proposed selling paintings by Brice Marden, Andy Warhol and Clyfford Still to buy works by minority artists. The plan was abandoned after fierce backlash; less than two years later, he left for SFMOMA.

Mr. Higgs said he discovered Creative Growth in 2002, when he was curator for contemporary art at the California College of Arts in San Francisco. Walking past the center one day, he peered through the windows to see a lively scene of creativity. “It was immediately apparent that something amazing was going on,” he said in an interview. He called it “the most transformative moment in my career in art.”

His message to Mr. Bedford included a photo of the Katzes, who did pioneering work on behalf of disabled artists at a time the Bay Area was at the forefront of movements for gay rights, women’s rights and civil rights for minority groups. He implored Mr. Bedford to acquire and exhibit works from Creative Growth and the two other area studios, predicting it “would have a transformative impact on the museum, its audience and ultimately art history.”

“If you do one thing,” Mr. Bedford recalled Mr. Higgs telling him, “do this.”

Weeks later, Mr. Bedford and a team from SFMOMA visited the center.

They were blown away. And money was available for a large purchase through the museum’s de-accession fund, used to diversify the collection with underrepresented artists. This would fit the mission.

“It was transformational for me to experience the artistic work and to connect with the place and its deep history, one that admittedly I didn’t know enough, or really anything, about,” Mr. Bedford said in an interview. “These are artworks and narratives that disrupt our common understandings of the trajectory of art and deserve substantially greater presentation and public engagement.”

Many of the pieces selected for the SFMOMA exhibition are fanciful representations of people and objects that reveal almost nothing of the artist’s life. Judith Scott’s oeuvre — random objects wrapped in yarn and fabric, now prominent in galleries and museums worldwide — offer no clue that she was born deaf with Down syndrome and was institutionalized for most of her years until her fraternal twin sister Joyce moved her from Ohio to California and into Creative Growth in 1987.

Others works offer hints of an atypical life. Mr. Miller, an autistic person who works wearing a helmet to safeguard against an epileptic seizure, marries swirling patterns in ink and paint with images and words that are sometimes typewritten, sometimes scrawled, but each included for reasons known only to him: “light bulbs,” “electrical sockets,” “drill,” “string,” “metal.” His works are in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Pompidou, MoMA and Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, and he exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2017. David Byrne of the Talking Heads has a Dan Miller. So does the photographer Cindy Sherman.

One of the more reflective artists is William Scott, who has autism, schizophrenia, a photographic memory and an easy smile. His whimsical and reverential paintings echo a wished-for more-perfect world with images of family members, celebrities, politicians, civil rights leaders and even himself as metaphors for rebirth and renewal.

In one piece planned for the SFMOMA exhibit, he renders a sad-faced self-portrait bearing scars on his chest from a fire in his childhood beside a similar figure with a slightly smiling face and no evidence of injury. In between he painted the words, “GOD’S PLAN.”

A selection of his architectural images of hoped-for redevelopment in San Francisco is planned to be part of an exhibition next year at the Cooper Hewitt design museum in Manhattan.

“Are you famous?” a studio aide asked him playfully as he sketched buildings on an iPad with a $30,000 app used by architects that Creative Growth purchased for him.

“I’m famous,” he said sheepishly. “I am.”

Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg of New York, major collectors of contemporary art, own more than 50 works by Creative Growth artists, including one by William Scott and another by Judith Scott, both on loan to SFMOMA.

“We’re in for a fight to get this population represented, the same way we did for women, artists of color and Indigenous Americans,” said Mr. Eisenberg, who serves on two curatorial committees at MoMA. “It’s important for a community to see their people up there.”

With prices for disabled artists’ work climbing, Mr. Bedford concedes that SFMOMA’s purchase price was a bargain. As with all sales, the money is split equally between the studio and the artist, but a show of this size is almost certain to raise artist profiles, drive prices higher, increase public appreciation and, by extension, boost museum attendance.

“We show them. Dealers swoop in, want to represent the artists,” he said. “Over time the value of the work increases. That’s what happened with African American artists; it will happen with native American artists, and it will happen with these artists.”

This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on the art world’s expanded view of what art is and who can make it.

At 80, Marta Minujín is still as stylishly bold as her art has been over her long career. She fashions platinum blonde hair and signature bangs. Aviator sunglasses usually cover her eyes; bold rings cover her fingers. Her ultra-colorful jumpsuits are an extension of her art, as if she is wearing a live piece of the striped mattresses and paintings that have become synonymous with her name.

A Buenos Aires native, born to a prominent Russian-Jewish family in 1943, Ms. Minujín began her career in the late 1950s. During the 1960s she experimented with mattresses, creating biomorphic soft sculptures, painted in striped patterns with fluorescent colors, which became her signature style. Each was a different iteration; some were small, others one could crawl inside, some referenced the body, which evoked intimacy, play, even eroticism.

“Half of your life takes place on a mattress. You are born, you die, you make love, you can get killed on the mattress,” said Ms. Minujín, during a recent interview with Rebecca Shaykin, the associate curator at the Jewish Museum in New York, who is the co-curator of a project that will highlight the artist this year. “That’s why mattresses are so important. I started with mattresses in the sixties, but then I stopped for 40 years, and then I started again in 2007. I went back to my roots.” (Ms. Shaykin’s interview appears in the show’s catalog.)

Ms. Minujín is not the only one returning to her origins. For the first time in her expansive 60-year career, she and her work will be honored in a stand-alone show at the Jewish Museum, in “Marta Minujín: Arte! Arte! Arte!,” Nov. 17 — March 31. The exhibit will showcase nearly 100 works from the artist’s archives along with private and institutional collections, including her mattress-based soft sculptures, fluorescent large-scale paintings, psychedelic drawings and performances, and rarely seen photographs and film footage.

“There’s a deep frustration that a generation of women artists have been overlooked. Marta is one of them,” said Ms. Shaykin, 38. “As curators, we have an obligation and a commitment to bring unheard, unrecognized or underrepresented artists into the discussion.”

For six decades, Ms. Minujín has created large-scale, politically playful art, purposely placed in experiential settings. In 1965, while traveling in a helicopter, she dropped live chickens and lettuce on an audience below that had gathered in a football field. In 2015 she mobilized people on a bridge in Buenos Aires and released flower petals in an attempt to create instant soul mates on a massive scale. Those events often forced the viewer not only to encounter the art, but to become part of the experience itself.

Though considered one of Argentina’s most recognized and celebrated creative people, who collaborated with American and French avant-garde colleagues like Niki de Saint Phalle, Christo, Charlotte Moorman, Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol, she has remained an overlooked and unknown name here in the United States.

That fact is one more reason “this is a long overdue show for a female artist who is a defining force with a distinctive hallmark in Latin American art,” said Darsie Alexander, 57, the acting director and the Susan and Elihu Rose chief curator at the museum. “In addition to being a woman artist coming into her own at the same age as Warhol and Rauschenberg in this generational milieu, Marta’s work never quite sat within the popular market driven trends.”

The Jewish Museum, on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, has always focused on celebrating women artists. Over the past decade its monographic exhibitions have featured Barbara Bloom, Rachel Feinstein, Martha Rosler, Laurie Simmons and Florine Stettheimer. Ms. Minujín will be their first female Jewish and Latin American artist profiled.

The exhibition will also be the museum’s first bilingual show. “We hope that will bring in a Spanish-speaking audience and an audience that is more familiar with Marta, but less familiar with the museum,” Ms. Shaykin said.

Ms. Alexander and Ms. Shaykin, the curators responsible for spearheading the four-year long project, talked about paying tribute to an unappreciated artist; what the museum is doing to be more inclusive; and how they plan to bring in younger audiences.

Why are you calling this a survey rather than a retrospective?

DARSIE ALEXANDER A survey suggests a more carefully chosen selection of works across an artist’s trajectory, as opposed to a retrospective, which is an exhaustive, deep dive into all phases of the artist’s career. We have works from every decade of Marta’s practice — mattress works from the 60s, her performances and paintings from the 70s, schematic drawings for her large-scale public sculptures made in the 80s, to works made today.

At 80, she is still creatively prolific; what was her most recent work?

ALEXANDER Her “Pandemia/Endemia” paintings were made during the pandemic. We are showing three works from the group that correspond to the different stages of the evolution of Covid. They are composed of thousands of tiny colored strips of fabric, which are adhered to a large canvas, forming an optical field of gyrating lines. They are stunningly beautiful and intricately labor-intensive works that were made in isolation while working quietly in her studio.

Do you have to be Jewish to be highlighted here or have some kind of Jewish thread?

ALEXANDER Though we’ve always viewed ourselves as an inclusive institution, Jewish identity is at the core of who we are and what we do. Over time what that identity means has changed. Marta is a descendant from a Russian-Jewish family that came to Argentina in the 1890s.

REBECCA SHAYKIN She has also drawn attention to her Jewish identity and the history of the war and the Holocaust in her work, “The Parthenon of Books,” (“El Partenón de libros”), particularly the reproduction of that work at Kassel, Germany, in 2017.

That piece, originally done in 1983, seems particularly significant to showcase given the current climate, wouldn’t you say?

SHAYKIN Yes. The push to abandon books that focus on Black, Jewish, queer and trans experience in the United States is under fire. It’s important to make sure those conversations and connections are happening when we present a work like “The Parthenon of Books” — that it’s been shown specifically in an Argentine context, and in a German and Nazi context, and that it’s relevant for American audiences and for young people today.

Is bringing in a younger viewer part of the Museum’s initiatives?

ALEXANDER Yes, we’re focusing on younger artists, but it’s important to recognize the work of people that are at the end of their careers, too. We tend to focus on what’s new and hot, but we are committed to recognizing the arc of someone’s trajectory. Marta has had a long career. She continues to make work in a relentless, tireless, exhaustive way while constantly reinventing herself. Her works are getting bigger, more prominent, more ambitious. We don’t lose sight of the fact that artists who are well into their 80s can still be making great work.

How are you expanding and including other audiences?

ALEXANDER We are actively collecting a young generation of artists like Alex Bradley Cohen, Ilana Savdie and Kali Spitzer. We have a new curator, Liz Munsell, whose focus is of that generation and our shared commitment to diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion work.

Since Ms. Minujín is Latina, how are you including her community?

SHAYKIN Marta’s show will be the first one we’re doing that’s bilingual. We hope that will bring in a Spanish-speaking audience and an audience that is more familiar with Marta, but less familiar with the museum. Jews are in interfaith families of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, and so the artists on our walls and the stories that we tell in our exhibitions should reflect that.

Marta, who currently has more than 250,000 followers on Instagram, is thriving on social media. Was that part of her appeal in drawing a younger audience?

ALEXANDER Social media and Instagram have had a huge impact on museums and the way word of mouth spreads about exhibitions. It can be incorporated into the experience of viewing art. Social media has enabled Marta to secure an incredible following of admirers of artists and fans. She was one of the first women artists to really understand how technology plays a role in shaping both her identity as an artist and the dissemination of her work. She will be posting during the run of the show, and I think that will generate interest in the exhibition.

What do you want the viewer to take away from this exhibition?

SHAYKIN An incredible sense of joy and discovery. Marta’s work is timeless, playful, engaging and tactile. She’s also a serious, rigorous artist. We also want to highlight the voice of a significant, underrecognized, not as critically evaluated artist like Marta, who is an extraordinary person, and put her on the map of contemporary art for this next generation.