On the evening of June 7, 1975, Matt was eight, playing a game of “spud” with other children near a grass runway in Lancaster County, Nebraska, when a small plane coming in to land struck him. The propeller severed his left arm; it was reattached, but his dominant left hand was later amputated. As a child he wore a hook. Every job he has held since has been done with one hand.
Six years later, at 14, he went to Newcastle, England with the United States team for the Disabled Children’s Invitation International Games and brought home seven medals, two of them gold.
He began painting in 1994, self-taught, while working as a software engineer in Washington, DC. The early paintings deal with his childhood trauma; he has said the nightmares about the accident stopped when he began to paint. About a year later he stopped wearing his prosthetic “electric hand.”
In 2002 he took best of show at the Fourth Annual Acquisitions Exhibition by Artists With Disabilities at Sunnyview in Schenectady, New York, and his paintings hung at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington for National Disability Employment Awareness Month. VSA Colorado’s Access Gallery in Denver gave him five solo shows between 2007 and 2016.
In 2013 the United Nations Postal Administration selected him as a disabled artist for “Break Barriers, Open Doors,” its stamp issue on disability rights, in a series with Chuck Close, Josephine King, Sargy Mann and Pete Eckert. His painting “Dive Bomb” was unveiled at the UN High Level Meeting on Disabilities and Development in New York on September 23, 2013. In 2025 ArtLifting accepted him as a represented disabled artist.
