Disability Art and Culture Project » Race and Disability

I, Object(ification): Contribute to our art installation!

disabilityartandcultureproject — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 02:06:45 +0000

Please contribute to an Interactive Art Installation called

“I, Object(ification)”.

Disability Art and Culture Project (DACP) members are creating an interactive art installation. It will be shown at a Revolutionary Arts Panel as part of the Disability Pride Art and Culture Festival,May 17, 2014.
The installation (exhibit) will look at ways the medical system marginalizes people with disabilities. Whether you have a disability, illness, injury, or health condition that is or is not diagnosed, many people feel like the health system reduces us to labels and body parts. We sometimes feel objectified.
We would like you to contribute to this installation so we get as many participants as possible! Here are the ways to contribute for either a video portion, a visual art portion or both.

Please see our anti-oppression statement. DACP makes all efforts to support an anti-oppressive environment so that our work does not oppress anyone or support ableism, racism, sexism, cissexism, heterosexism, ageism, and the other ways in which marginalized people are oppressed.

VIDEO JOKES

See the list of light bulb jokes lined here. These were ALL written by people with disabilities and Disabled people. They are intended to be satire.

If you find some you really like, please video or audio record yourself telling them. You may rewrite any on the list to suit you. You can also create new ones on whatever part of your identity you want to explore (disability, health, ethnicity, poverty, etc.)

If you write a new joke, please write it from your own experience. We will not broadcast jokes that are violent or hateful.

For recording, you can use a video camera, smart phone, tablet or webcam. If you do not have access to these, you can submit a written joke for someone else to record, draw a picture of the joke, or express the joke in whatever way works for you.

Please submit your joke-telling by email to Cheryl Green at info@storyminders.com. If your recording is too large to email, contact Cheryl. We will work out a plan.

Deadline for light bulb jokes is May 1st, 2014 at 5:00 pm Pacific Time

OUCH PICTURES

We would like to show pictures that represent how diverse, complex and individual pain can be. Many people feel physical, emotional, spiritual or psychic pain. Sometimes, no one else can see where, how or why it hurts. So a lot of people in pain are told they are faking it or that it’s not that bad.

To explore the diversity of pain, we are looking for photographs, drawings or paintings of pain. Please submit a picture or drawing of yourself or your pain or even a close up image of some part of you that hurts. It can be something that appears painful or that does not appear painful to others. It might be a cut on your arm, a swollen joint, or a head that “looks fine” but hurts, for example. You may remain completely anonymous. Each photo or artwork will have the label “Ouch” added underneath it.

Please note that DACP has the right to decide what will be included in the Art Installation. Our goal is to have work that is a good fit for our community, which includes people under 18 years of age. We will include as many as possible, but we might not be able to include all submissions.

Artworks can be emailed to Cheryl Green at info@storyminders.com to be included.

Deadline for Ouch artworks is May 1st, 2014 at 5:00 pm Pacific Time

Download our call for participation in the art installation I, Object(ification: Contribute to DACP art installation I, Object(ification)

June’s Dis/Representation: Reading into Disability

disabilityartandcultureproject — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 02:31:56 +0000

Join us to discuss fiction and nonfiction readings on disability justice!

In-person discussion in a NEW location, same building but new room: 208 Terrell Hall, Portland Community College Cascade Campus, 6:00-8:00pm.

If you would like to participate in real time from your home, by phone or computer, go to http://DisRepresentation.com/ for information on how to access the conversation online!

Also join us at DisRepresentation.com for online discussion of the readings anytime!

EVERYONE IS WELCOME TO PARTICIPATE.

Whether you read everything, one of these pieces, or none of these reading selections, WE WANT YOU HERE!

READINGS FOR JUNE 27 GROUP:

FICTION/POETRY:

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

The Secret Garden is widely available in libraries and bookstores. The text is also available for free on Project Gutenberg. You can also read a copy for free in several accessible formats at the Internet Archive.And there is a free audiobook available on Librivox, read by a human.

Chris Hewitt, Four Poems in Bent:

http://www.bentvoices.org/bentvoices/hewitt_fourpoems.htm

NONFICTION:

Cal Montgomery, “Harry Potter and Separatism” from A Ragged Edge Online: http://www.raggededgemagazine.com/focus/potter0604.html

Renee Martin at Womanist Musings, “You’re cured now right” http://www.womanist-musings.com/2012/02/youre-cured-now-right.html

Garland-Thomson, “Staring at the other,” Disability Studies Quarterly 2005 v. 25 no. 4, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/610/787

Hel, Black Broken & Bent, “What’s apparent?” http://blackbrokenandbent.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/whats-apparent/

Building Radical Accessible Communities Everywhere, “Inspiration Porn” http://buildingradicalaccessiblecommunities.blogspot.com/2012/02/inspiration-porn.html?zx=39542697836e416b

In the next week we’ll put up concept maps/summaries in accessible language.

To participate in real time online, see http://www.disrepresentation.com/reading-group/

And watch this space for the link to the Blackboard Collaborate session.

Dis/Representation is a program of Disability Art & Culture Project (https://dacphome.org/), Portland Community College Disability Services, Gimp Girl (http://www.gimpgirl.com/) and other community partners!

Portland Community College is an Affirmative Action Equal Opportunity Institution.

This program was made possible in part by grant from Oregon Humanities (OH), a statewide nonprofit organization and independent affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which funds OH’s grant programs.

ACCESS:

Contact disabilityartculture@gmail.com with access questions or requests.

Wheelchair accessible

Natural light and (optional) low-flicker fluorescent lighting.

There will be a live captioning stream available through the website to online participants and projected on a screen during the program.

ASL interpreting available by request (please let us know at disabilityartculture@gmail.com).

Accessible by transit (72 bus, within a mile of yellow line Max Killingsworth stop).

Please refrain from wearing scented products.

Gender neutral restrooms available in two accessible adjacent campus buildings.

Armless chairs available.

There is an elevator to the second floor of Terrell Hall and power buttons on the building’s outer doors and restrooms.

DisRepresentation: Reading Into Disability launches!

disabilityartandcultureproject — Thu, 16 May 2013 10:15:21 +0000

We are very proud to announce the beginning of our disability justice reading group!

Go check it out! http://www.DisRepresentation.com

Find reading lists, access information, and both ongoing online discussion and information on how to join a real-time reading group conversation! Our first in-person reading group is Thursday, May 30, from 6:30-8:30pm in PCC Cascade Campus’s 112 Terrell Hall. Join us in person or online, or start talking over at the DisRepresentation website discussion forum!

Or find our facebook group and join the facebook event for in-person or real-time online reading group discussions!

And tell your friends!

This program was made possible with generous support from Oregon Humanities, and contributions from community partners Portland Community College Disability Services and Gimp Girl, as well as consultation and ongoing support from community experts on everything from reading groups to disability literature.

DACP Statement in Solidarity with People of Color & Anti-racist Organizers after the “Shirley Q. Liquor” incidents in Portland, OR.

disabilityartandcultureproject — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 11:17:58 +0000

Many of us are dealing with the aftermath of a series of racist incidents in Portland, OR, DACP’s home community. On January 30, 2013, the Eagle Bar booked a notorious drag performer, Charles Knipp. Knipp performs his most famous and racist character, “Shirley Q. Liquor,” in blackface, and perpetuates the incredibly ugly “Welfare Queen” stereotype of poor Black women. LGBTQ people of color and allies organized to put pressure on the bar to cancel the performance. The bar did cancel the performance on February 1, and there was a backlash against the cancellation. Some volunteers with the Portland Q Center tried to set up a community dialogue to help Portlanders deal with the incident at the Eagle Bar. They did not consult queer communities of color beforehand, though, and framed the issue in a way that gave complaints of “censorship” equal weight to people of color naming racism; this minimized the concerns of anti-racist organizers. Activists again worked to center the voices of African American women in the conversation, to hold the Q Center accountable to queer people of color, and to reframe the community discussion to have an anti-racist, anti-oppression lens. The community dialogues were postponed because of these critiques. The discussion about how to deal with all of these incidents continues among Portland’s queer communities of color, in comment fields on the Q Center’s website, and in the Portland community outside of the Q Center or Eagle Bar.

Disability Art and Culture Project wishes to join all of the incredible writers and activists who have already worked on this issue to state that blackface is unacceptable. It is racism in action. We are artists and activists, writers and performers, and we know about how devastating censorship is to those speaking from the margins; however, “censorship” is not the right frame to explain the work of keeping Charles Knipp’s racist minstrelsy out of our community. We are invested in a definition of disability justice that is inextricably linked with racial justice. We echo Karol Collymore’s recent piece in Bitch Media to say that one of the most basic, and most important, aspects of anti-oppression work is to listen to the people who experience oppression, believe what they say, and look to them for leadership in ending that oppression. By making this statement, we wish to offer our support to people of color who are feeling the effects of racism particularly strongly. We are also in solidarity with the white people and people of color who have been organizing and agitating to keep the leadership and voices of queer women of color at the center of the community response to this incident of racism—who have said: It’s time to LISTEN to people of color in Portland, and act accordingly.

Members of the disability community often speak up against nondisabled actors playing disabled characters in the media. Not only does the practice keep Disabled performers from working in the entertainment industry, but it keeps us from setting the terms of our own representation. When we are prevented from determining the ways that we are portrayed, the old, pervasive, ableist stereotypes about us continue to inform the ways that dominant culture understands disability and Disabled people. “Crip drag” tells us more about the dominant culture’s failure of imagination than it tells us about actual Disabled people’s lives—but it still affects Disabled people every time Disabled dancers are erased from popular culture, every time Disabled performers can’t find an inclusive dance class or an accessible stage, every time disabled writers’ and artists’ work are reduced to “inspiration” rather than powerful works of art unto themselves, every time Disabled people’s voices are ignored.

Though racism and ableism are not the same, the fact is that blackface tells us more about white supremacy culture than anything about actual Black people, and still affects the everyday lives of people of color. Likewise, depictions of welfare recipients as lazy, ignorant, unworthy of societal support, and subhuman hit disability communities hard, and people of color disability communities even harder. In our current society, which does not value the interdependence that disability communities cultivate and celebrate, many Disabled people cannot survive without some kind of government support. One of the reasons that attacks on poor people, fat people, and disabled people who receive government benefits are so effective in politics is that such attacks invoke the specter of the “Welfare Queen,” a racist trope about Black women that can be traced back to older stereotypes about Black people. People perceived as undeserving of support are devalued by racist and ableist systems of culture and policy—so the social safety net keeps disappearing, ADA is eroded, affordable housing disappears and gives rise to more homelessness, everyone suffers, and we have to fight for our own and each other’s liberation.

Well, we have always had to fight for our own and each other’s liberation. We celebrate disability and racial justice movements that work to de-institutionalize us, to do away with subminimum wages and barriers to work. We celebrate the people who work to challenge the school-to-prison pipeline that targets young disabled men of color, remove barriers to full participation in society, and end environmental racism that creates disproportional chronic illness in communities of color and poor communities. We celebrate the people who have worked to keep Knipp’s racism out of their communities in years past (e.g. Imani Henry, a trans Caribbean activist, artist, and performer, wrote a mass e-mail that galvanized thousands of people in Boston and New York as early as 2002—and Jasmyne Cannick ran a website calling for communities to ban Knipp and collecting news about successful organizing in cities all over the U.S. that was active until 2008). We celebrate the African American women, the LGBTQ and same gender loving and Two Spirit people, drag performers, the communities of color and the white folks in solidarity, the leather folks (especially leather people of color), and the Disabled and nondisabled people who have spoken, written, and organized around this issue in our city and in other communities. We are with you.*

Thanks for a great year!

disabilityartandcultureproject — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 14:32:25 +0000

Dear friends of the Disability Art and Culture Project,

Thank you for being part of our most successful year yet! You can help us jump-start our work for 2013 by making a tax-deductible gift to DACP before 11:59pm on December 31!

2012 was fantastic for DACP!

We had our second annual Sex, Love, and Disability fundraiser and the fifth Disability Pride Art and Culture Festival since our founding in 2005. The Festival’s theme was the power of art to cultivate social change. We had live performance, panel discussion and a Theatre of the Oppressed Workshop with The-TREE Institute. We are proud to have worked with incredible writers and performers in our community, and with Antoine Hunter, the Oakland-based African American Deaf and Hard of Hearing Choreographer, Dancer, and founder of the Urban Jazz Dance Company. Hunter performed solo dances and worked with local dancers to choreograph and premiere a collaborative piece at the Festival.

In 2012, Aireen Joven was hired as our first ever organizer. She built relationships with individuals and organizations, developed and recruited volunteers, and helped DACP set the stage to run more smoothly. She brought an invaluable artistic and racial justice perspective to her work. Your donation will help us develop new leaders and continue our racial justice work!

Since 2008, Inclusive Arts Vibe has had dance classes at Lynch View Elementary School. This year, Rachel Esteve, IAV Dance Company member, is interning there as an Assistant Dance Teacher. IAV also added dance classes at Alder Creek Middle School, perfomed in the Festival, and were featured performers at the disability-themed Colored Pencils in August. IAVDC welcomed three new dancers this fall, and the company is in rehearsal for their upcoming May performance.

This summer, we organized an online community survey and Community Listening Session at Portland Community College’s Cascade campus. DACP wanted—wants!—to hear from our community. We used what we learned to determine the direction of DACP—regular arts programming, opportunities for cross-cultural listening, continued work on anti-racism, more space for disability art and culture, education within our various diverse communities on racial justice and disability justice and their intersections. We have had rich discussions about art and social justice. The Community Listening Session also featured a presentation by artist Rupert Kinnard on race, disability, sexuality, gender, and art.

In the fall, DACP analyzed survey data, applied for and received partial funding to continue the IAV dance classes, and in November partnered with Story Minders to host Disability Comedy Movie Night. Cheryl Green premiered her film “Friending with Brain Injury!” We had an incredible conversation about disability culture, dark humor, insider/outsider dynamics, and the role of comedy in social justice work. Over fifty people got together for food, conversation, and fun!

We have a lot to look forward to in 2013:

Starting on January 11, 2013, DACP will host an accessible, low-cost life drawing group every second Friday of the month, at Project Grow. We will break down barriers to disability art and culture making one art session at a time!

In the spring, DACP will partner with GimpGirl, In Other Words, and local and national humanities experts and Disability Studies scholars to launch a Disability Studies reading group! Expect to read academic and non-academic, fiction and nonfiction, works on intersectional disability justice and diverse disability cultures. We’ll have lectures by local and national Disability Studies scholars, and both in-person and online discussions.

We’ve started to plan a springtime art-auction fundraiser for the Inclusive Arts Vibe Dance Company performance with youth art classes facilitated by local artist Lavaun Heaster. And, of course, IAVDC’s recital will be in May!

We’re also tentatively planning a symposium on the intersections of race and disability in visual culture, and a book launch/poetry reading with local poet William Alton. With every event, we further the artistic expression of people with both non-apparent and apparent disabilities, support our communities in understanding disability culture and pride, and help the wider culture reimagine the definition of disability, art, and culture.

We would like to ask you to consider making a personally significant year-end gift to Disability Art and Culture Project to kick off a spectacular new year. To those of you who have given your time and resources, thank you. We accomplished so much this year with volunteer time, donations, and the determination and creative flair that our disability arts community is famous for. We couldn’t have done it without you. All of us at the Disability Art and Culture Project want to thank you for a fantastic 2012, and we look forward to building vibrant disability art and culture with you in 2013 and beyond!

Sincerely,

Kathy Coleman, Artistic Director
Sarah Doherty and Cheryl Green, DACP planning committee