Indisposable: Tactics for Care & Mourning Curated by Jessica A. Cooley and Ann M. Fox October 1 - December 10, 2022
Indisposable: Tactics for Care and Mourning is the follow-up to Indisposable: Structures of Support after the Americans with Disabilities Act, a three-year collaboration with more than thirty artists and scholars that emerged as eight online chapters each addressing the urgent questions of the moment where COVID- 19 pandemic and demands for racial justice laid bare that some lives—especially disabled, queer, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC)—are deemed disposable.
Indisposable: Tactics for Care and Mourning focuses on two topics critical to the online iteration of the exhibition: care and mourning. The artists of Indisposable address the difficult work of not just how to care and to mourn for those deemed disposable but how to activate that work into tactics for insisting on our indisposability. The artists in the exhibition are committed to resisting the oppressive ideologies of bodily productivity and “normalcy” that have been used as markers of human worth.
This exhibition takes an expansive approach to access. The access needs of artists and gallery visitors are prioritized by curating and presenting work in a way that anticipates physical, sensory, and processing differences. Access is a form of creativity, with artists incorporating it in ways both innovative and intentionally exceeding the minimal or routine. By
centering the daily tactics for survival – including that access needs are met – practiced by those living at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, access also becomes a powerful tool for resistance.
A large-print exhibition brochure is offered for all visitors. Touch objects are available near the gallery desk and are intended to be handled by all visitors, especially those with different cognitive processing needs and low-vision and blind visitors. You can access an audio guide that contains visual descriptions of all the works in this exhibition. Most of these descriptions have been written and recorded by the artist themselves, allowing you to hear the voice of the artist and their personal description of their works.
About the Curators
Jessica A. Cooley and Ann M. Fox have been a collaborative curatorial team since 2009, when they co-curated RE/FORMATIONS: Disability, Women, and Sculpture and STARING (based on the work of disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson). They have lectured and published internationally on crip curation and crip art.
Curator Jessica A. Cooley (she/her/hers) is a scholar-curator with a PhD in art history from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Her first book project centers on what she calls “crip materiality” and will forward a new methodology to address how ableism affects the understanding and valuation of the very fibers of art materials within curatorial and conservation
discourses. Cooley was assistant curator at Davidson College’s Van Every/Smith Galleries where two of the exhibitions she co- curated are considered among the first in the nation to investigate the intersection of disability and art: RE/FORMATIONS: Disability, Women, and Sculpture and STARING. Currently, Cooley is an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow serving as a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of
Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts Engagement Hub.
Curator Ann M. Fox (she/her/hers) is a Professor of English at Davidson College, where she teaches courses in literary and cultural disability studies, modern and contemporary drama, and graphic medicine. Her scholarship on disability and visual representation has been published widely, and she has also co- curated several disability-related visual arts exhibitions, including RE/FORMATIONS: Disability, Women, and Sculpture; STARING; and Re/Presentations of HIV/AIDS.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to Jessica
A. Cooley’s profile page:
https://www.acls.org/fellow-grantees/jessica-a-cooley/
Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to Ann M.
Fox’s profile page: https://www.davidson.edu/people/ann-fox
EXHIBITION CHECKLIST
Allison Leigh Holt
A Living Model of Hyperbolic Space, 2017 / 2020
Glass, water, steel, neodynmium magnets, mirrored acrylic, Parmotrema Perlatum lichen
Dimensions variable
The water-filled glass spheres in A Living Model of Hyperbolic Space are intended as scaled-up water droplets, like those of morning dew, clouds, and the water in the air we breathe.
Water’s refractive properties act as a lens, magnifying what lies behind it while projecting the image of what lies before it. As Holt writes, “The frilly, crenellated form of Parmotrema lichen is a natural example of the true shape of the space in which we find ourselves, so-called hyperbolic space. The shortest distance between two points, therefore, is never a straight line, but rather, a curved one. From a young age, Westerners learn to live within Euclidean city grids, and to extend that order to the not-quite-fixed world of natural forms and systems, into
their worldviews.” The work invites us to defamiliarize our sense of scale and positionality relative to the natural world, and in so doing, recast our understanding of our place in it.
About the Artist
Allison Leigh Holt (b. 1972) (she/hers) is a neurodivergent artist, scholar, and teacher living and working in Northern California.
Her multidisciplinary research-based work uses techniques of expanded cinema and the Light and Space Movement to model divergent ways of sensing, processing, and exchanging information. Holt also teaches experimental video to autistic
teens and adults both in groups and one-on-one, using a pedagogy that she calls Neurodivergent Media.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to Holt’s
webpage: https://www.oillyoowen.com
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram
search bar to go to Holt’s Instagram accounts
@oillyoowen @neurodivergentmedia
What Would an HIV Doula Do?
What Does an Uprising Doula Do?, 2021 128 pages, 8.5 x 5.5 inches
What Would an HIV Doula Do? is a community of people joined in response to the ongoing AIDS Crisis. They write: “We understand a doula as someone who holds space during times of transition. We understand HIV as a series of transitions that begins long before being tested, continues after treatment and beyond. We know that since no one gets HIV alone, no one should have to deal with HIV alone. We doula ourselves, each other, institutions and culture. Foundational to our process is asking questions.”
Uprisings too are transitions that require the care and support of doulas. The What Does an Uprising Doula Do? zine asks us to consider the diversity of uprisings in terms of who participates and how that participation happens. For example, what does
uprising mean for folx with disabilities who cannot show up in
normative ways? As the community writes, there are “many rhythms, forms and scales” to protest and uprising and thus many needs for diverse spaces and supports. As a result, we
“rethink and reshape our shared relationship to resources, our commitment and accountability to mutual care, our very understanding of power. And ourselves.” The What Does an Uprising Doula Do? zine will be available for exhibition visitors to take with them as a way of connecting to and carrying forward activist tactics for care and mourning.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to WWHIVDD webpage: http://hivdoula.work
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to WWHIVDD Instagram account: @wwhivdd
Pamela Sneed
Installation of works from the series:
Tops, 2022
When My Brothers Were Alive and the Sun Shone, 2022 The Mourning Series, 2018
Untitled Haiku, 2022 Watercolor, acrylic, neon Dimensions variable
Pamela Sneed’s watercolors profoundly document her evolving experiences of mourning over time. When My Brothers Were
Alive and the Sun Shone is a series of portraits of Sneed’s chosen family, men from the queer community who died of AIDS in the early days of the pandemic. Sneed vividly brings to life the beauty and joy that their lives embodied, reminding us of the enduring ache of their loss. The images link pandemics; then, as now, vibrant lives were needlessly lost through the stigma and dismissal leveled at seemingly disposable communities; then as now, homophobia, ableism, and racism are foully ensnared. There is a profound connection between these images and her watercolors of those murdered in the 2022 Tops Friendly Markets shooting in Buffalo, NY. The portraits are of community members, activists, and caregivers who formed an important web of support in their families and their East Side community. Sneed mourns their loss, and in presenting the group image, invites us to reassert care as their legacy: as a means of anti-racist work, joy, and survival. In the fragmentation and abstraction of Sneed’s Mourning Series, she offers another side to the experience of mourning. Her collages are more visceral in their expression of mourning as something that is impossible to fully know or comprehend and never fully complete. Positioned between these framed portraits and collages is a white neon haiku in Sneed’s own handwriting. The Haiku radiates and reverberates a message centered by both care and mourning as it makes space for grief to lay her head on Sneed’s brown shoulder.
About the Artist
Pamela Sneed (she/hers) is a poet, writer, performer and visual artist, author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than
Slavery; KONG and Other Works; Sweet Dreams; Funeral Diva; the chapbooks Lincoln and If the Capitol Rioters Had Been Black; and two chaplets, Gift and Black Panther.
* Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to WWHIVDD Instagram account: @pamela_sneed
Alex Dolores Salerno EXTRAHERE, 2021
Coffee beans, thread, and cable reel 16 x 20 x 16 inches
Despite being one of the world’s most traded commodities, coffee has become a normalized and often overlooked symbol of work culture. The title EXTRAHERE is Latin for to drag out, draw forth, extract, or remove. Global capitalism’s extraction of resources and demand for constant productivity hides behind notions of coffee as social currency and the guise of workplace hospitality. Positioning slowness and rest as an access need, the artist’s process entails spending time gluing together countless coffee beans, one by one on a continuous red thread, rejecting urgency, grind culture, and using the process as a way of stimming.
About the Artist
Alex Dolores Salerno (b. 1994) (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Informed by queercrip experience, they work to critique standards of
productivity, notions of normative embodiment, the commodification of rest, and 24/7 society.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to
Salerno’s webpage: https://alexdoloressalerno.com/home.html
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to Salerno’s Instagram account: @alex_dolores_
Alex Dolores Salerno & Francisco echo Eraso Regalos, 2020
Used pillowcase, handspun thread, hair 94 x 46 inches
Regalos (“gifts” in Spanish) is a sculptural installation created in collaboration with Alex Dolores Salerno that explores the embodiment of queer-crip time through the ephemera of dreams, rest, and growth between partners. For Regalos, Eraso and Salerno have split open a shared and worn pillowcase where the sweat from sleep has stained both sides of the fabric. Cascading from the pillowcase are handspun golden threads whose collective shape mimics the rectangular space of a bed. Originating from the artists’ practice of gifting their hair to each other, small bundles of hair are tenderly knotted along the lengths of the thread reminiscent of Quipus. The Quipu is a textile made of knotted strings used by pre-Columbian Andean groups to keep records, collect data, and tell stories. Rest, interdependency, and the transcendent space of the bed are
here offered as sacred treasures. The collaborative nature of this work speaks to the critical crip tactic of dismantling individual achievement and instead celebrating collective work and collective rest.
About the Artists
Alex Dolores Salerno (b. 1994) (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Informed by queercrip experience, they work to critique standards of productivity, notions of normative embodiment, the commodification of rest, and 24/7 society.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to
Salerno’s webpage: https://alexdoloressalerno.com/home.html
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to Salerno’s Instagram account: @alex_dolores_
Francisco echo Eraso (he/él) is a disabled, trans, Colombian- American interdisciplinary craft artist, curator, educator, arts administrator, and accessibility consultant. He is interested in grassroots approaches to disability justice, trans liberation, cooperative textiles, and the creative redistribution of resources. His art practice makes evident the construction of value through reproductions and allusions to the color gold and its related histories of mining, capitalist accumulation, decadence, alchemy, and healing practices.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to Eraso’s
webpage: https://franciscoechoerasojr.com/home.html
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to Eraso’s Instagram account: @realityhasbeenpostponed
Kiyan Williams
In Defense of Weeds, 2022
Amaranth, LED grow light, mirror-polished stainless steel, MDF Dimensions variable
Williams’ In Defense of Weeds is an installation that quite literally grew out of one of the artist’s public art sculptures.
Amaranths grew at the base of the sculpture but were removed over the objections of the artist because they were considered weeds by the groundskeepers. What is traditionally worthy and unworthy of our attention within horticultural norms becomes a powerful metaphor in this installation. Plants defined in another context as weeds are now situated within the gallery atop a pedestal. Within the gallery, the plants are now treated with care that contributes to what Williams terms the plant’s survivance (a neologism formed out of survival + resistance). As Williams writes, “In Defense of Weeds is a small intervention to the protocols of disposability, and an attempt to intervene on what (or who) gets cared for (cultivated), and what (or who)
gets thrown away.” Despite the artist’s utopian hopes, they consider that the conditions of a gallery might not be the most hospitable for life to flourish, and that these plants might meet
their original fate. That care might be more than offering them a new home but shifting the culture by which they are rendered disposable.
About the Artist
Kiyan Williams (they/them) is a visual artist and writer who works fluidly across performance, sculpture, video, and 2d realms. Rooted in a process-driven practice, they are attracted to quotidian, unconventional materials and methods that evoke the historical, political, and ecological forces that shape individual and collective bodies.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to
Williams’s webpage: https://www.kiyanwilliams.com
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to Williams’s Instagram account: @kiyanwilliams
Raisa Kabir
NO PROTECTION, 2020
Yarn, wool, and cotton
20 x 24 x 4 inches each panel
Kabir examines how some bodies are more valued by and for global structures of production. They interrogate the eugenic- capitalist logic that prizes young, able-bodied persons; extracts their labor at a disabling pace without the most basic support structures of healthcare, rest, and safe food and housing; and
then discards them as disposable. Kabir uses textile production in her work to cite these structures, as we see in her eponymous sculpture NO PROTECTION. What do we do, Kabir asks, when we cannot look to the world around us for care and safety?
NO PROTECTION protests the pervasive and persistent failure to protect queer, trans, and disabled people of color from harm. Kabir writes that NO PROTECTION “…takes root from disability, queerness, dysfunction, and inability to process unspeakable things that were inherited trauma. It is about mourning all the times we were failed by those who were
meant to protect us from harm. A collective voice – a personal
action.”
About the Artist
Raisa Kabir (b. 1989) (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist and weaver based in London. Kabir utilizes woven text/textiles, sound, video, and performance in their work to materialize concepts concerning the cultural politics of cloth, labor, and embodied geographies. Their (un)weaving performances comment on power, production, disability, and the queer brown body as a living archive of collective trauma.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to Kabir’s
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to Kabir’s Instagram account: @raisa_kabir_textiles_
Kevin Quiles Bonilla
Carryover (Blue Tarp in Vega Alta), 2019 C-print
41 x 61 x 2 ¼ inches
In Carryover (Blue Tarp in Vega Alta), the body of the queer-crip artist merges with and is abstracted by the detritus left behind in the wake of Hurricane Maria, a blue plastic tarp. What, Bonilla asks us, are we doing with the piles of ruins left in Puerto Rico – and elsewhere – in the wake of the disasters caused by climate change? How does the lack of substantial response to the climate crises pile danger upon danger, indignity upon indignity, further carrying over colonial oppression onto the bodies of those in the storm’s path? The blue tarp itself becomes a signifier of loss and disposability after a disaster, serving as flimsy coverings to patch the holes in houses. As Bonilla notes, these blue tarps still dot the island today. Bonilla stands out of and in nature where the stiff folds of the blue tarp over their head and body create a sculptural structure that reappropriates the detritus of disaster that was intended for disposability and remakes it into an almost grand form. However, as Bonilla’s limp posture emphasizes, this grandeur is imbued with a grief for those lives and livelihoods lost to climate crises. Bonilla takes the possibilities of the blue
tarp one step further, asking us “What happens when the body
replaces the structure? – or rather, what happens when the
body becomes the structure to protect?”
About the Artist
Kevin Quiles Bonilla (b. 1992) (he/they) is an interdisciplinary artist born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. They explore ideas around power, colonialism, and history with their identity as context.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to
Bonilla’s webpage: https://kevinquilesbonilla.com
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to Bonilla’s Instagram account: @kevinquilesbonilla
Alex Dolores Salerno Arranged with Care, 2022
2 channel video, airplane pillowcase, herbs, and the color of horchata lojana
Dimensions variable
Arranged with Care is a 2 channel video that considers translation and slow looking as forms of access, as well as intergenerational healing through access to plants and cultural traditions. The video features the artist’s mother and aunt who presents many of the herbs used to make horchata lojana, a traditional medicinal drink from Loja, Ecuador, through an iPhone video texted to the artist when they could not travel to visit their family due to the pandemic. The video is installed on
two monitors, the original Spanish video on one and an interpreted English version on the other, with a doubling of captions in both languages in large text on each video. The viewing bench is painted the color of horchata lojana. The vibrant color is understood to invigorate the consumer. Sitting on the bench is a small airplane pillowcase stuffed with many of the same herbs, to be embraced by the audience. By connecting rest and crip-time to our relationship with the earth, Arranged with Care explores disability aesthetics and embraces disability existence as a tactic to refuse and subvert capitalist expectations.
About the Artist
Alex Dolores Salerno (b. 1994) (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Informed by queercrip experience, they work to critique standards of productivity, notions of normative embodiment, the commodification of rest, and 24/7 society.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to
Salerno’s webpage: https://alexdoloressalerno.com/home.html
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to Salerno’s Instagram account: @alex_dolores_
Sami Schalk
#QuarantineLooks: Embracing the Fabulously Mundane, 2020 24 x 36 inches each
Becoming a Pleasure Artist: Pleasure is the Point, 2022 24 x 16 inches each
C-prints
Courtesy of Sam Waldron/Dutcher Photography
How does disability create knowledge essential to surviving a global pandemic? One answer: joy. As an act of pleasure activism and self-care during the pandemic lockdown, Schalk began posting images of herself on social media with sparkly new hairstyles, outfits, and facemasks. The act of dressing up to handle ordinary tasks such as walking the dog or taking out the trash sparked delight and connection with strangers and friends. In her words, "joy begets joy begets joy."
Photographs from Sami Schalk’s #QuarantineLooks: Embracing the Fabulously Mundane (2020) and her boudoir series Becoming a Pleasure Artist: Pleasure is the Point (2022) insist on joyful visibility for her fat, Black, queer, femme body. They likewise challenge what depression looks like and interrogate what it means to look well or unwell. Melding the politics of both public and private space, Schalk asserts that wherever there is pleasure there is power. Here, pleasure activism is underscored as a tactic for care and resistance.
About the Artist
Sami Schalk (b. 1986) (she/hers) is a pleasure artist and an associate professor of Gender & Women's Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison who celebrates and centers pleasure as a tactic for healing and liberation. Her scholarship focuses on
disability, race, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture. Schalk's upcoming book, Black Disability Politics (Duke UP 2022) focuses on disability politics in Black activism in the post-Civil Rights era.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to Schalk’s
webpage: https://samischalk.com
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to Schalk’s Instagram accounts: @pleasureisthepoint
@fierceblackfemme
Black Power Naps
Chill Pill (Rockabye Baby), 2022
Plywood, paint, mattress, dye, cotton gauze, Kanekalon hair
16.4 x 9.8 feet
We invite you to rest and relax in the gallery on the sculptural installation from Black Power Naps. The rocking motion of Chill Pill, its soft multihued tie-dyed fabrics, rounded shape, and plush space soothe the weary visitor. This installation is a pointed intervention into traditional gallery spaces that offer few areas for extended contemplation by a seated public, let alone reclining and sleeping. The rocking sculpture soothes the guest and exists as a critical form of care that, in so doing, also serves as an anti-racist tactic. Black and Latinx people have been stereotyped as lazy even as white supremacy has dictated their bodies labor on frontlines of all kinds. During the Covid-19
pandemic, an unsurprising paradox emerged: workers deemed “essential” were also made disposable by a society that exposed them again and again to the dangers of infection through unsafe and laborious working conditions. The Chill Pill is a space where rest can be immediately reclaimed, where we can contemplate how to hold institutions accountable, and where the ongoing oppression perpetuated through the denial of repose is, at least for a moment, halted.
About the Artists
Black Power Naps (Navild Acosta + Fannie Sosa) (he/him, they/them) is a sculptural installation, vibrational device and curatorial initiative that reclaims laziness and idleness as power. Their practice both exposes the oppressive nature of how rest has been denied to marginalized populations and creates a space for reparation and the redistribution of rest.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to Black
Power Naps’ webpage: https://blackpowernaps.black
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to Black Power Naps’ Instagram accounts: @black.power.naps
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to Navild Acosta’s Instagram account: @navildbxacosta
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to Fannie Sosa’s Instagram account: @onesosalove
Indira Allegra
TEXERE: The Shape of Loss is A Tapestry, 2022
Commemorative images and text offered from users of TEXERE, LED Tiles
Dimensions variable
How can we begin to mourn the many, many losses of the pandemic? How do we counter the ways in which pandemic has created a culture of disposability? For Chapter 8 of Indisposable: Structures of Support after the ADA, Allegra addressed these questions by creating a global, web-based platform entitled TEXERE. Loss is a normal part of the human experience. Yet so often losses go unrecognized, or we are urged to forget them, get over them, and move on quickly.
Indeed, we need more rituals and objects to acknowledge our losses. TEXERE transforms human losses into a new kind of memorial object, an ever-evolving digital tapestry created with submissions authored by people using the site. The creation of the digital tapestry exists as both a new kind of memorial object and visual evidence of the need for mutuality and interdependence as the basis of care work that is shared between people. Every TEXERE participant becomes an artist in collaboration with other artists worldwide in a new practice of memorial making.
The installation Allegra created for Indisposable, TEXERE: The Shape of Loss is a Tapestry, invites you to share something you are grieving. The monitors in the gallery will display the constantly evolving digital tapestry created in real time that interweaves your loss with those entered by others. In creating a visible, accessible point of intersection, Allegra deploys the centuries-old art of weaving in the digital space to remind us that the shape of loss – our intertwined stories of it – is a tapestry. TEXERE: The Shape of Loss is a Tapestry moves mourning from the solitary to the collective and intertwined; in so doing, it creates what Allegra terms “global grief equity.”
About the Artist
Indira Allegra (b.1980) (they/them) is a conceptual artist and recognized leader in the field of performative craft. Allegra’s performances and installations explore the transformative poetics of death, memorial, and regeneration.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to
Allegra’s webpage: https://www.indiraallegra.com
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to Allegra’s Instagram accounts: @indiraallegra
fierce pussy Transmission VI, 2022
Offset and Braille on paper, limited edition of 3000
Transmission VI, commissioned for Indisposable, is on view in the gallery and available for guests to take with them.
Transmission VI uses an open-letter format to relay communications from a future or distant utopia where the current horrors of oppression that continue on our dying planet are incomprehensible and worrisome. In each Transmission the beings ask more questions in their attempts to understand the violence, inequality, and cruelty in contemporary human society. Through their questions and offers of help, these beings sketch out alternate possibilities for social relationships and sustainable living.
fierce pussy engages written language as inherently visual, while freely combining references to past, present, and future. Transmission VI draws on various visual vernaculars: the expansive possibilities of punctuation, the retro styling of a telex machine typeface, the red framing lines of legal documents, and the tactile language of Braille.
About the Artists
fierce pussy (Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka) is a collective of queer women artists. Formed in New York City in 1991 through their immersion in AIDS activism during a decade of increasing political mobilization around LGBTQ+ rights, fierce pussy brought lesbian identity and visibility directly into the streets. Low-tech and low-budget, the collective responded to the urgency of those years by using readily available resources: old typewriters, found photographs,
their own baby pictures, and the printing supplies and equipment accessible in their day jobs.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to fierce
pussy’s webpage: https://fiercepussy.org
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to fierce pussy’s Instagram accounts: @fp_1991
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to Zoe Leonard’s Instagram account: @zoe_leonard_studio
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to Joy Episalla’s Instagram account: @jepisalla
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to Carrie Yamaoka’s Instagram account: @carrie.yamaoka
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar for posts about Nancy Brooks Brody: #nancybrooksbrody
Riva Lehrer
Zoom Portraits: Alice Wong, 2020 Graphite, colored pencil on acetate
25.25 x 31.25 inches
The Risk Pictures: Sharrona Pearl, 2021
Charcoal, pencil, pastel, and collage on acetate and illustration board
25 x 63 inches
Riva Lehrer’s Zoom Portraits: Alice Wong and The Risk Pictures: Sharrona Pearl illustrate the paradoxical and sometimes bittersweet nature of care during a pandemic. For Lehrer, a portraitist, the virus stole from her the intimacy of collaborating with the subjects who pose in her studio, a presence whose loss she deeply mourns. These Zoom portraits portray the imperfect but necessary ways in which she is adapting her process as a protection for herself and others. Indeed, the triptych in The Risk Pictures: Sharrona Pearl connects that protection to the PPE frontline medical workers wore as they tended to the sick and vulnerable. Sharrona Pearl, a medical ethicist and historian whose scholarship explores theories and histories of the face, is portrayed here in full-face, a formidable insistence on presence even in the midst of physical absence. The third portrait is of Lehrer herself, based on secret screenshots that Pearl took during their virtual sittings. Similarly, Zoom Portraits: Alice Wong is a potent metaphor for the transformative nature of care. Because of affordances like Zoom, disability justice activist Wong can, in concert with Lehrer, espouse a visibility that sustains crip community. and historian whose scholarship explores theories and histories of the face, is portrayed here in full-face, a formidable insistence on presence even in the midst
of physical absence. The third portrait is of Lehrer herself, based on secret screenshots that Pearl took during their virtual sittings. Similarly, Zoom Portraits: Alice Wong is a potent metaphor for the transformative nature of care. Because of affordances like Zoom, disability justice activist Wong can, in concert with Lehrer, espouse a visibility that sustains crip community.
About the Artist
Riva Lehrer (b. 1958) (she/hers) is a Chicago-based artist, writer, and curator whose portraits celebrate and center people stigmatized due to their physical embodiment, sexuality, or gender identity. Lehrer’s process explores the relationship between artist and subject, working to upend traditional hierarchies of power in art-making and recognize the intertwined nature of creation.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to Riva
Lehrer’s webpage: https://www.rivalehrerart.com
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to Riva Lehrer’s Instagram account: @rivalehrer
Jill Casid
Untitled (Throw Out), 2017 - 2022
Video (16:30), paper envelope, projector
Conceived, written, and performed by Jill Casid and realized by Jack Kellogg
Dimensions variable
Spirochetes of Contact, 2019
SX-70 Polaroids, wooden support structure conceived in collaboration with and fabricated by Sylvie Rosenthal 30 x 192 x 12 inches
Casid’s Untitled (Throw Out) takes its name from the
handwritten instruction ("letters: throw out”) left by their
great-aunt on an envelope containing the incomplete remnants of an effort to save their mother who had been deported to the Gurs concentration camp. Casid follows its double-sided command to “throw out” as in discard and “throw out” as in to transmit to approach Hart Island and the lives buried there that are rendered disposable in what Casid calls the Necrocene. The film compels us to grapple with how to make crip, queer, trans*, and racialized life livable by holding onto our dead (i.e., melancholy) as fodder for that other sense of “throw out,” that is, to express. Flanking this film is Casid’s installation, Spirochetes of Contact, that takes us to that other New York island, Fire Island (one of the epicenters of the AIDS crisis and Lyme Disease) in the form of the boardwalk as cruising ground where we “pick up” on all its various meanings – sex, ideas, drugs, viruses, conversation. Casid heightens our felt sense of the material volatility of the original Polaroids by exposing them on top of the equally precarious support structure of the wooden boardwalk to engage us in intimate encounter with the images and their fragile supports as vulnerable material sites of and for our desire.
About the Artist
Jill H. Casid (she/they) is Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A historian, theorist, and practicing artist, Casid’s research participates in critically extending the scope of intersectional crip and queer-feminist interventions in visual studies. Casid's hybrid research practice combines performative scholarship that pursues theorizing as a creative writing practice with a performance and photo-based art practice dedicated to developing methods for approaching the materializing force of imaging.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to Jill
Casid’s webpage: http://jillhcasid.net
Click on, or copy and paste, the following into the Instagram search bar to go to Jill Casid’s Instagram account: @jillhcasid
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Indisposable: Structures of Support After the Americans with Disabilities Act is a multi-module exhibition that rolled out as a series of online events over the course of 2020-2022.
Drawn from some of the leading artists and scholars addressing the lived experience of disability today, Indisposable: Structures of Support After the ADA addresses the urgent questions of our moment where pandemic and demands for racial justice intersect, insisting on answers to several questions: What
makes our lives livable? How do we afford our own existence and what happens when we cannot? Who creates the means by which we survive; or were we ever meant to survive? Where are we seen as disposable, and why? How can we insist on our own indisposability?
CHAPTER VIDEOS CHAPTER 1
Features a meditative film, El Dios Acostado by Alex Dolores
Salerno about the disabling effects of colonialism. Performance by Ryan J. Haddad, poetry by Ellen Samuels, film by Alex Dolores Salerno, and conversation with Kevin Quiles Bonilla.
* Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to Chapter 1: https://youtu.be/PSrTU7IXJ14
Indisposable: Structures of Support After the ADA, Chapter 1 El Dios Acostado
The first chapter of Indisposable begins with a performance by actor/playwright Ryan J. Haddad, who serves as MC. The event features a poetry reading by scholar/writer Ellen Samuels and features a new film by Alex Dolores Salerno. Salerno’s short meditative film focuses on three scenes from their mother’s hometown San Pedro de la Bendita in southern Ecuador and the neighboring town of Vilcabamba, which was made famous by purported claims of residents who lived well beyond 100
years. Dubbed “The Valley of Longevity”, Vilcabamba became a
popular destination for American and European tourists. The film sets a pace of rest and repose for the viewer while asking us to consider the disabling ramifications of colonialism and tourism and the high value placed on productivity and immortality. The film screening was followed by a conversation between artists Alex Dolores Salerno and Kevin Quiles Bonilla.
CHAPTER 2
Features a video essay, #QuarantineLooks: Embracing the Fabulously Mundane by Sami Schalk who creates pleasure activism during a global pandemic. Live illustrations by MK Czerwiec, video essay by Sami Schalk, and conversation with Jina B. Kim
* Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to Chapter 2: https://vimeo.com/754443009
Indisposable: Structures of Support After the ADA, Chapter 2 #QuarantineLooks: Embracing the Fabulously Mundane
How does disability create knowledge essential to surviving a global pandemic? One answer: joy. As an act of pleasure activism and self-care during the pandemic lockdown, Schalk began posting images of herself on social media with sparkly new hairstyles, outfits, and facemasks. The act of dressing up to handle ordinary tasks such as walking the dog or taking out the trash sparked delight and connection with strangers and
friends. In her words, “joy begets joy begets joy.” Schalk's #QuarantineLooks embraces the lushness of her “fat Black
femme” body; challenges what depression looks like; and
interrogates what it means to look well or unwell.
CHAPTER 3
Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa’s film, FRONTLINES OF ALL KIND, documents their endeavors and challenges during the pandemic. Film by Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa, conversation with Mandy Harris Williams
* Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to Chapter 3: https://vimeo.com/754412482
FRONTLINES OF ALL KIND is a new video commission documenting artists Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa endeavors and challenges during the pandemic. The filming occurred during the rehearsal period of the Black Power Naps opera “Choir of the Slain'' which premiered at a Berlin theater in the fall of 2020. The opera offers a lush audiovisual landscape where rest and idleness reclaim power and offer healing for the people who are most denied rest and relaxation. Based on historic truths and recent studies, we know that race, class, and socio-economic status determine the amount of quality rest that one can achieve. Working under the strain of a global pandemic exacerbates this social inequity for many, particularly Black people who labor at front lines of all kinds. By creating a collage of the beautiful moments found against the backdrop of institutional power structures, FRONTLINES OF ALL KIND offers
an insight into what liberating spaces of rest for Black and racialized people entails.
CHAPTER 4
Raisa Kabir’s film, House Made of Tin (a socially distanced weaving performance), of her public weaving performance created by and for BIPOC, disabled, and queer participants. Film by Raisa Kabir, conversation with melannie monoceros and Raju Rage.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to Chapter 4: https://vimeo.com/754825256
Indisposable: Structures of Support After the ADA, Chapter 4 House Made of Tin (a socially distanced weaving performance)
Raisa Kabir critically examines how global structures of production create a hierarchy in which value and care are assigned to laborers that can adhere to eugenic and capitalist expectations of “useful” and “functioning” bodies. Kabir uses textile production in their work to alternately cite these
structures and reclaims their output as allegory for, in Kabir’s words, “the ways in which marginalized communities rely–and have always relied–on support networks of care and structures of mutual aid to survive that are separate to the state.” In their woven sculptures, the intertwined threads of weaving signify the interdependent care on which disability depends. These interrelationships, made visible, perform a disability aesthetic that resists commodification and individuation.
Through an open call, Kabir organized and documented a public weaving performance in October 2020 created, by, for, and from BIPOC, disabled, and queer participants. The result was a geometric textile sculpture created through interdependent action and care. Kabir used the documentation from the performance to create this new film, House Made of Tin (a socially distanced weaving performance). The visible face masks and physical distance between participants underscores the urgency and precarious nature of support structures during a time of pandemic. By embodying these structures of support and mutual aid, this performance asks us to consider how labor and care are connected across all bodies and borders. In doing so, House Made of Tin (a socially distanced weaving performance) underscores a key precept of disability justice
that, in Kabir’s words, “is dependent on wider society believing in, and participating in, creating access for all.”
CHAPTER 5
Conceived by Jill H. Casid, Melancholy as Medium turns our mourning for the twin epidemics of HIV/Aids and Covid-19 into an activist wake to conduce our outraged grief. Transmission V (2021) by fierce pussy, reading by Pato Hebert and Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad of What Would an HIV Doula Do?, Untitled (Melancholy as Medium) by Jill Casid, poetry by Pamela Sneed, and poetry and conversation with Heather Lynn Johnson.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to Chapter 5: https://vimeo.com/754836407
Indisposable: Structures of Support After the ADA, Chapter 5 Melancholy as Medium
What to do with the ways we’re being undone? Chapter 5: Melancholy as Medium brings us together for an activist wake that refuses to move on. The event unfolds a ritual of mediumship to conduce our outraged grief as catalytic for the uprising and care work of living with more than one virus, amidst more than one pandemic, carrying our as yet
unaddressed losses into the battles we’re still waging in the name of supports for the thriving of Black, Brown, Indigenous, crip, queer and trans vitalities.
The session begins with Transmission V (2021) by fierce pussy. Holding space to ask such questions as ‘what does a collective grief doula do?’, members of the What Would an HIV Doula Do? collective Pato Hebert and Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad read the introduction of their co-edited zine, What Does an Uprising Doula Do?. Jill Casid debuted a screening of their short film, Untitled (Melancholy as Medium) made especially for Indisposable that conjures with the material fragility of analogue photography to commune with the incalculable but still powerful presence of unredressed loss. Intervening in the telling of HIV/AIDS as history and honoring the transformative powers of Black lesbian litany and elegy, Pamela Sneed performed selections from Funeral Diva (2020) to remind us of the forms that resistance shouldn’t have to take— like survival. Master of ceremonies for the evening Heather Johnson read
from her own work and gathered session participants for a culminating convocation.
This chapter was conceived by Jill Casid.
CHAPTER 6
Kiyan Williams’s film, Piecing Myself Together after the World Has Ended, confronts the erasure of memory and histories of enslavement that ableism and racism mutually enable. Film by Kiyan Williams, conversation with Abigail DeVille and Ariel René Jackson.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to Chapter 6: https://vimeo.com/754843590
Indisposable: Structures of Support After the ADA, Chapter 6 Piercing Myself Back Together After the World Has Ended
Working fluidly across sculpture, video, and performance, Kiyan Williams is attracted to quotidian, unconventional materials and methods that evoke the historical, political, and ecological forces that shape individual and collective bodies. Piecing Myself Back Together After The World Has Ended is a new video in a series of works which furthers the artist’s aesthetic and conceptual exploration of Blackness, ecology, and trans/gressive subjectivity; wherein bodies are in process, oscillate in legibility, and blur the boundaries between self and other forms of sentient life. The artist meditates on the body as an assemblage and entanglement of many forms of matter— plant life, fungi, earth, water, light—enduring, transforming,
decaying, and regenerating amidst climate catastrophe and colonial violence.
The conversation between artists Abigail Deville, Ariel René Jackson, and Kiyan Williams considered their practices engaging land, memory, and diasporic legacies as forms of recovery, care, and cultivating an expansive and collective sense of self.
CHAPTER 7
Allison Leigh Holt’s film, Stitching the Future with Clues, explores neurodivergent thinking in perceiving our world, challenging conventional definitions of what it means to be human. Film by Allison Leigh Holt, conversation with neuroscientist Clifford Saron, PhD, and artist Meredith Tromble.
*Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to Chapter 7: https://vimeo.com/754850879
Indisposable: Structures of Support After the ADA, Chapter 7 Stitching the Future with Clues
Stitching the Future with Clues is an experimental documentary that looks at neurodivergence as a way of knowing, through a cybernetic lens. Combining animated diagrams, video and audio feedback processes, and expanded media techniques, Stitching the Future with Clues draws from Holt’s article "Feedback Structures, Ways of Knowing, and Neurodivergence” (PUBLIC #59), and asks one to consider feedback systems as a medium
for understanding the sensing, processing, and exchanging of information happening not just in human minds and brains, but within and between all scales of intelligent life. This film explores the post-humanist sense-making of neurodivergence: differently-attuned to temporal, psychic, and environmental embodied experience.
Text, animation, performance, and editing by Allison Leigh Holt; video synthesis by Kit Young; and sound by electronic musician
/ producer Thomas Dimuzio.
CHAPTER 8
Texere is Indira Allegra’s global, art-based, web platform that provides a space for users to share their losses by digitally weaving images and words into a collaborative, ever-evolving online tapestry. Texere by Indira Allegra; Therese Noël Allen, a therapist specializing in trauma-informed psychodynamic and somatic therapy; and with exhibition curators Jessica A. Cooley, and Ann M. Fox.
* Click on, or copy and paste, the following URL to go to Chapter 8: https://vimeo.com/754853759
Indisposable: Structures of Support After the ADA, Chapter 8 TEXERE
Loss is a normal part of the human experience. Yet so often losses go unrecognized, or we are urged to forget them, get over them, and move on quickly. Indeed, we need more rituals
and objects to acknowledge our losses so we can live more fully in the present moment and not be trapped by past experiences. TEXERE is a global, art-based web platform which transforms human losses into a new kind of memorial object - an ever- evolving digital tapestry created with posts authored by people using the site. The creation of the digital tapestry will exist as both a new kind of memorial object and visual evidence of the need for mutuality and interdependence as the basis of care work that is shared between people. Every TEXERE participant becomes an artist in collaboration with other artists worldwide in a new practice of memorial making.
Event attendees were invited to contribute an image to text to commemorate a personal loss to be incorporated into a collective digital memorial tapestry.