Crip News v.143

New works, "Disability Justice," calls, and events.

NEWS

New Works

• Cara Page and Philip A. Sanchez’s immersive film Psalm for the Mismemoried premiered last week at Prime Produce (NYC). It is “a story of an ancestor named Future who travels across time & space to take mismemoried ancestors (the missed and the lost memory of ancestors when they are disappeared and were taken from generations) home from historical sites of medical harm.”

• Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) and Disability Rights California have issued a statement condemning mask bans and urging lawmakers to protect disabled people’s access to public life.

  

  Mae Howard, Velocity of a swing (2024)

• Elevated Embrace, an exhibition of works by Mae Howard and Gabriella Moreno, is on view at GHOSTMACHINE (NYC) through August 24. The show features “tactile materials, text, and forms that signify strength and vulnerability as mutually contained, often in conversation with personal and archival narratives informed by BDSM and disability vantage points.”

  

• The RestFest Film Festival begins this week on Thursday, August 15 for a week of films & video artworks by Disabled, Deaf, chronically ill, mentally ill, and/or mad artists with 11 virtual live events led by some of the RestFest 2024 Artists + other disability arts community members.

• WUNC’s Embodied podcast features several episodes about disability, sex, and intimacy.

“Disability Justice”

Every so often, I report on some of the corners of the internet where I notice this term is appearing. Here are some recent findings:

• The Disability Frontlines Fund at the Third Wave Fund recently published a feature on D/deaf & Hard of Hearing leadership in Disability Justice organizing, spotlighting the work of HEARD & Deaf Abused Women Network (DAWN). The Fund also published a list of their current grantees.

• The Mill City Museum in Minneapolis, Minnesota is showing a community-led exhibition curated by AmplifyMN called The Art of Disability Justice Now through November 3. The show “deliberately centers the narratives and leadership of individuals who have historically been most marginalized within the mainstream Disability Rights Movement, including BIPOC, queer, trans, and immigrant disabled people.”

• A bingo card-making site, Bingo Baker, offers a “Disability Justice bingo card.”

• A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice by Katie Tastrom published by PM Press uses “extensive research and professional and lived experience to illuminate the way the State uses disability and its power to disable to incarcerate multiply marginalized disabled people, especially those who are queer, trans, Black, or Indigenous.”

• The Australian Disability Justice Network’s “Guiding Vision” statement uses the framework of Disability Justice developed on Turtle Island in the so-called Australian context of the “most grievous and violent acts of ableism and dispossession on this continent [that] continue to be enacted upon Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.”

• A recent town hall meeting of organizers in Dallas, Texas about the need to stop cop city concluded with a call to understand language access and Disability Justice as integral to the movement to end police terror.

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CALLS

• Disabled And Here is seeking Portland, Oregon-based disabled Black, Indigenous, people of color for a photoshoot on August 23 called “Together, We Mask!” More here.

• Project LETS is hiring Spanish-speaking facilitators based in Providence, Rhode Island for its high school-aged Anti-Carceral Peer Mental Health Advocate & Counseling Program. More here.

• Raleigh, North Carolina-based Arts Access Gallery is seeking artworks for a tactile exhibition called Please Touch the Art! Submit by Friday, August 16. More here.

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EVENTS

Photo: Scott Shaw.

Kayla Hamilton’s How to Bend Down/How to Pick It Up

August 15 - 17, The Shed (NYC)

In How to Bend Down/How to Pick It Up, Kayla Hamilton explores lineages of Black disabled imagination and alternative world-building through an immersive, community-specific, multidisciplinary dance performance. The performance moves through three historical spaces—the cotton field, the Black church, and the freakshow/circus—where disability was hidden, deemed unproductive, reduced to spectacle, or asked to be prayed away. How to Bend Down/How to Pick It Up offers an archival exploration of these spaces and a reclaiming of agency, recentering the parts of the self that were discarded or suppressed in those settings while carrying forward the ancestral task of envisioning a future where every-body is free. The production makes use of multiple audio descriptors and a performance structure that can reconfigure every night based on the performers’ changing needs.

Va-va-voom! A celebratory crip dance party

Tuesday, August 13, 7 - 9pm ET, on Zoom

Join Sins Invalid for a celebratory crip dance party! This is the closing session for Sins Invalid’s School of Popular Education, and the unveiling of the gorgeous graphic novel created by Trinidad Escobar with support from Creative Wildfire.

Strategy Clinic for Black Disabled Movement Workers

Thursday, August 15, 6 - 8pm ET, on Zoom

PeoplesHub invites Black disabled movement workers into strategic conversations to sharpen our organizing approaches, develop points of unity amongst Black radical disabled people and share tools, skills, and resources that continue to support Black disabled people.