CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new exhibition at Krannert Art Museum features artists whose work addresses disability or non-normative identities and reflects their experiences.
“Crip*” runs through Dec. 11 at KAM at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The exhibition was co-organized by Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois Chicago, and it will be on view there in the spring.
Curator Liza Sylvestre, KAM’s curator of academic programs, said the exhibition refers to “crip theory,” which considers not just disability but also race, sexual identity, class and educational status, and how those identities connect and overlap.
“All of these things have everything to do with access and inclusion. It’s very seldom someone has just one of those identities. They are usually intersecting each other. I wanted to choose artworks that are complicated and that resisted a singular interpretation,” said Sylvestre, who is deaf.
The exhibition also considers ways to increase accessibility in art institutions. It is part of a larger collaborative project, “Cripping the Arts,” that was funded by the Presidential Initiative: Expanding the Impact of the Arts and the Humanities.
For example, Sylvestre created audio descriptions for every work of art with the artists, recorded them and linked each to a QR code. This allows visitors to listen with their smartphone while in the gallery. Braille labels, produced with assistance from the Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services, are placed throughout the gallery, as well. Through this approach, Sylvestre said she hopes to model exhibition practices that are inclusive for a wider range of visitors.
Christopher Robert Jones – an interdisciplinary artist whose work encompasses new media and sculpture and who teaches in the School of Art and Design – examines whiteness and how the violin is intertwined with Western cultural identity in their work “PureImagination_Sextet.” The installation features six roughly made violins, constructed from the cheapest wood available, piled on the floor and attached to media players.
“The origins of the violin as an instrument are foggy and mysterious. Musicologists marked its beginnings as it emerged as a Western classical instrument, even though it was in the folk and more populist tradition for much longer,” said Jones, a serious violin student when they were younger.
The violins can be seen as an extension of the body, with the media players serving as prosthetics to allow them to play. Jones sees parallels between the standardization of the instrument, so music written for it could be shared and replayed, and the social construct of disability produced through industrialization.
“In an economy based around a specific kind of labor, a body needs to be able to perform certain kinds of labor to be a productive, efficient member of that society,” they said.
Most conversations around disability concern what accommodations are needed to provide access. Jones and Sylvestre said they hope to move away from a problem-solving relationship to disability.
“There is a pervasive medicalized understanding of disability. Specific conditions have been categorized and pathologized. They were failures to be corrected,” Jones said. “Rather than seeing a specific disability or disabled experience as defined by a lack or difference, we want to ask: What is the knowledge produced by that experience or that way of moving through the world?”
In the film project “The Tuba Thieves,” exhibiting artist Alison O’Daniel uses her experience with hearing loss to ask what happens in the absence of sound. The film was inspired by the theft of tubas from several Southern California high schools. O’Daniel imagined students in band practice with no instruments. She asked composers to write musical scores based on various images, and she wrote the film script in response to their music. Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim produced the score.
Exhibiting artist Carly Mandel, who has a chronic illness, created sculptures including a gigantic medical ID and an arm exerciser made from a coil of heavy white cement beads that resembles a broken spinal column, resting on a shoe store bench with slanted mirrors. Her work looks at how medical spaces and retail spaces are conceptually similar, with access to both dependent on money.
Shannon Finnegan, who has cerebral palsy, created a series of benches and cushions designed for exhibition spaces for her project “Do you want us here or not?” A bench installed in “Crip*” reads, “This exhibition has asked me to stand for too long. Sit if you agree.” The seats offer both a critique of the demands that spaces such as art galleries make on the body and a solution.
A two-day colloquium Oct. 21-22 will explore the issues raised in the “Crip*” exhibition. The hybrid event can be attended in-person at the Siebel Center for Design and virtually via Zoom, and will feature ASL interpretation and live captioning for all attendees. Artists, faculty members and students will discuss access to the arts and the ways disability and access have informed their research, teaching, art making and learning. The colloquium also includes talks by exhibiting artists Finnegan and Carmen Papalia, an exhibition overview by Sylvestre, and a panel of students who will share their experiences with disability and access on campus.