Crip News v.155

Election day, new works, other news, calls, events, and intensities.

Nov 04, 2024

U.S. Election Day 2024

Here are a few additions to last week’s issue about tomorrow’s general election:

Tomorrow from 10 - 10:30am PT, 504 sit-in legend Dennis Billups is leading an election day “Meditation for the Movement” session on Zoom.
The REV UP Voting Campaign, with Microsoft and Lyft, are offering free and discounted wheelchair-accessible rides to polling stations in Boston, Chicago, NYC, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland (OR), and San Francisco.
Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha published a special edition of their newsletter on preparing for post-election safety.
And if you’re looking for a long read, check out “Voting is Not Harm Reduction – An Indigenous Perspective” published in 2020.

New Works

Illustration of five BIPOC friends enjoying a planetarium show together, all sitting and wearing a variety of masks and colorful summer outfits. In the group: a Black trans man using a power wheelchair, an Afro-Latina woman who’s an arm amputee, a Black Autistic person holding a star-shaped fidget, an invisibly disabled Asian femme, and a multiracial person using a mobility scooter. Stars twinkle in the overhead dome as soft purple light fills the room and an air purifier hums in the background. A wheelchair access symbol can be seen beneath the mobility scooter. — Illustration: **Jonathan Soren Davidson** for **Disabled And Here**.

Disabled and Here, a project to create free and inclusive stock images celebrating disabled BIPOC, has released new images in their Together, We Mask series.

A poster with a frosty wavy glass background hiding a white LED cube with rain drops falling. In front of the glass is an abstract photo of Vanessa who is a Chicana woman that has caramel skin. Vanessa is looking back wearing a black holographic dress and a leather trench coat where her purple walker, Pluto is meshed with the backward image of Vanessa in an action shot of her flipping her hair back with the same dress but with out the jacket. The red & white glitchy text in front of the images reads: Center: VDE: 'Void Decryption ERROR’ 'Exhale Static, Inhale Fumes' Vanessa Hernández Cruz & 'Rain Glass Vortex’ Vanessa Hernández Cruz, Emily Waters Ande Diedjomahor, India Harville, Lu Chen — Graphic design by **Kianna Peppers**. Photography by **Maya Umemoto Gorman**.

Void Decryption ERROR by Vanessa Hernández Cruz recently debuted at Highways (Santa Monica, CA). The experimental evening length performance “dives into the complexities of our digital existence, where community is sought in unexpected places and technology both bridges and breaks the spaces between us.”

The book cover featuring an illustration of a person with a red snake wrapped around them and lush vegetation in the background

Jane Shi’s book of poetry, echolalia echolalia, is out now from Brick Books. Shi spoke with the CBC about the poems’ focus on “experiences of being queer, disabled and in the diaspora.”

A bare white puppet leg is coming out of a red stage curtain. Handwritten cursive text says That Paradise Place. An erotic puppet musical.

That Paradise Place, an “erotic puppet musical about the love, sex, and fantasy lives of artists with disabilities,” recently debuted at Abrons Art Center (NYC). The show was created and performed by Pussypaws Puppetry, an inclusive puppet troupe of visual artists, musicians, and performers with and without disabilities and presented by Summertime, a studio, gallery and residency for neurodiverse artists.
Mad Studies Reader: Interdisciplinary Innovations in Mental Health, edited by Bradley Lewis, Alisha Ali, and Jazmine Russell, is out now from Routledge.

PLANTS PROPERTIES EQUIPMENT by AO Roberts is “art game on an unknown planet” and “a quest to find care in an unknown world and to build a container for future medical cosmologies,” with soundtrack music (on Bandcamp, above) by Johanna Hedva, Andy Slater, Molly Joyce, Chisato Minamimura, Medical Museum (Hang Linton and Laura Lulika) and VOR.

Disabled comic Tina Friml was recently made her late-night debut on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and was profiled in The Stranger
Videos, slides, and notes are now available from the 2-part “Disability Justice in Organizing Spaces” series by c kaufman, Rise, & Jade T Perry in July 2024.
For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability, an exhibition organized by Jill Dawsey and Isabel Casso that “narrates the history of recent art through the lens of disability,” is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego through Feb. 2, 2025.

Gallery view of teracotta walls with video installation and four wooden structures holding several metal bells.

Towards New Worlds, “a large-scale exhibition” featuring 15 disabled, D/deaf and/or neurodiverse artists’ “experiences of seeing, hearing, feeling and sensing the contemporary world,” is on view at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in Middlesbrough (UK) through Feb. 8, 2025.
Cripple Punk Mag recently published “SIGNING IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SINGING THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN” by Paul Hostovsky.
New research from SMU Data Arts looks at the role of local arts agencies in distributing Covid relief funding in 11 communities.
Researchers with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives submitted a report to Employment and Social Development Canada about the new Canada Disability Benefit aimed at reducing poverty for disabled Canadians.

As part of the Hospital Rooms Digital Art School, disabled artist Dolly Sen offers a zine-making workshop.
Activist Mike Ervin recently penned an article about the corporate greed of private equity’s influence on medical equipment.

In Other News…

Solange Knowles, Stevie Nicks, and Matt McGorry are some of the celebrities who have recently identified as chronically ill, giving love to spoonies and mask safety.
Disability Divest is calling on the Anthem Awards to revoke her recent “Sustained Achievement Award” for the actress’s pattern of xenophobic, anti-Arab, and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Starting this month, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will require hospitals to report information about COVID-19, influenza, and RSV similar to reporting that was required before the lapse of the Public Health Emergency declaration.
Mask mandates are returning to health care facilities in many counties in the Bay Area until March 1, 2025.
Soon after the U.S. Department of Transportation issued a $50 million penalty against American Airlines for violating the rights of passengers who use wheelchairs, several disability organizations and the SEIU union called on Secretary Buttigieg to issue a final rule “ensuring safe accommodations for air travelers with disabilities using wheelchairs with the strongest possible training requirements.”
Last month, G7 and the European Union members signed the new Solfagnano Charter with commitments to addressing independent living, inclusion in new technologies, and participation in social life.
Lawsuits seeking to expand insurance companies’ coverage of GLP-1 weight loss drugs are pushing to have obesity defined as a disability.
Several disability organizations have called the “Disability Equality Plan for Scotland” a weak and diluted “sham.”
A new report from the U.S. Senate looks at the deception and danger of profit-driven Medicare Advantage plans run by insurance giants like UnitedHealthcare and CVS.

CALLS

Rest in power, Peta Pottinger. Peta was “a queer, black, neurodiverse nonbinary immigrant who loved spicy foods and the sound of black people laughing.” Help support hir memorial expenses.
Genderqueer drag artist Dia Dear needs support to survive long Covid. Donate here.
SICK Magazine will be awarding two $300 micro-grants to sick/disabled sculptors, sponsored by The Robert J. Spring Endowment for Sculptors. Apply by Nov. 30. More here.
Leonardo CripTech Incubator is seeking applications from disabled artists for the Touch Aesthetic Fellowship for a Los Angeles-based research and creative exploration fellowship that explores the intersections of haptics and disability. Apply by Nov. 18. More here.

EVENTS

Disability Worlds: A reading and discussion

TODAY, Monday, Nov. 4, 6 - 7:30pm ET, in-person at NYU (NYC)

Join us for a brief reading from the new book Disability Worlds (2024, Duke University Press) with authors Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (NYU Anthropology) followed by discussion with Mara Mills (NYU MCC and Director, Center for Disability Studies).

Tales From the Crips: Reimagined Fairy Tales with a Disabled Lens

Friday, Nov. 8 - Saturday, Nov. 9, in-person at the Strand Theater in Boston and online

This is Abilities Dance Boston’s annual fall ballet that is taking different fairy tales and further emphasizing a disabled lens. What if Sleeping Beauty had Chronic Fatigue? What if a non-disabled Mulan was also impacted by ableism? Artistic direction/choreography under Ellice Patterson with musical direction under Andrew Choe.

Kinetic Light LAB Hangout

Friday, Nov. 8 & Friday, Nov. 22, 2 - 3:30pm ET, on Zoom

Hangouts are hosted as an open-structured virtual social space for disabled artists to connect and get to know one another. Hangouts offer space to talk about disability, art making, creative practices, life hacks and tips, dreams, desires, disability wisdom, and more. You’re welcome to bring ideas for conversation or a bit of art that inspires you. LAB Producers, morgaine and Camisha, will loosely guide the gathering, offering topics and questions as needed. Come meet and be with us!

There’s a tilted horizon and thin lines that shoot out from a vanishing point like a sunset (the usual Crip News header) except the colors are inverted and it’s a black background with white lines, like nighttime. Big text floats over the land-line: INTENSITIES BELOW. Smaller text under: we could breathe, hold the breath and let it out slow, mist the plants, or notice a sensation, get water, leave the screen entirely, nap

UN experts recently warned that disabled Palestinians face “unbearable protection risks, including inescapable death and injuries, amid indiscriminate attacks by Israeli occupation forces which have destroyed critical infrastructure, and annihilated the possibility of humanitarian assistance.”
For Labs for Liberation, LJ Jaffee published “Access-Washing Genocide in Gaza.”
As part of their Care Fellowship with Caring Across Generations, cherry kaufman (ck) published an intimate essay called “When care is scarce” about ableism, care, and abuse.
In September, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published research showing that disabled people are five times more likely to experience domestic violence than non-disabled people, and make up a third of its victims.