NEWS & NEW WORKS
Bosnian lawmakers have adopted legislation that ties disability benefits to the minimum wage, significantly increasing the amounts of monthly support.
Graffiti artist and carver Anaru Ruka has won the Te Tohu Iho Pūmanawa title in Creative New Zealand’s Ngā Taonga a Te Waka Toi Awards for the “contribution of a Māori artist with lived experience of disability.”
Jennifer Brough of the resting up collective reviews Carolyn Lazard’s Long Take at Nottingham Contemporary, up through May 7th.
Opening this week on Feb. 28th and running through March 26th at The Public Theater in NYC, Ryan Haddad’s DARK DISABLED STORIES is the artist’s newest autobiographical play, a series of unforgiving vignettes about the strangers he encounters while navigating a city (and a world) not built for his walker and cerebral palsy. Directed by Jordan Fein, and starring Dickie Hearts and Alejandra Ospina, DARK DISABLED STORIES probes implicit ableism and the assumptions we make about people we'll never really know.
CALLS
Sick in Quarters (SiQ) is forming a community mask redistribution network. You can sign up if you can hold a quantity of masks to give freely in your area. All form responses will be shared as a public access spreadsheet database for mask access. Image description: A neon green negative of the zoomed-in side of a KN95 face mask on a black background. Slightly off center is light beige, all caps scripted gothic font that reads ‘FREE’ [end text]. Underneath of this is a ‘KN95’ printed label in all caps bold neon green, and below this is the word ‘MASKS’ in the previous all caps light beige font. In the bottom left corner is marigold yellow all caps scripted gothic font that reads, ‘NYC & LA’ [end text]. In the bottom right corner is the SiQ logo, with the capital letters S and Q in light beige, and the blood drop lowercase letter i in dark red.
Vendor applications are now open for the Sick and Disabled Zine & Craft Fair 2023. Apply by April 18 at sadfair.com/apply. Image description: graphic with a dark green background with yellow bold text that says “vendor applications are open!”. There is smaller text above that says, “Sick and Disabled Zine & Craft Fair” and below that says, “due April 18”. There’s a small illustration of some scissors and other art supplies.
EVENTS
Lecture Series: Care, Disability, and Art
Thursdays, from 18:15 to 20:00 CET, approximately every two weeks, online.
The Rethinking Art History through Disability research group at the University of Zurich is organizing a lecture series on Thursdays, from 18:15 to 20:00 CET, approximately every two weeks, starting with Introduction: Thinking with Disability by Virginia Marano, Charlotte Matter, and Laura Valterio (University of Zurich), Marie-France Rafael and Judith Welter (Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK) on March 2nd.
Deaf Spotlight’s Short Play Festival
March 2nd - 5th, in person in Seattle and virtually
The festival features 6 original, never-been-produced, 10-minute plays themed around a floral shop.
VITRUVIAN by Jerron Herman
March 2nd, 6:30 - 8:00pm ET, in-person at the Baltimore Museum of Art
Hailed by the Brooklyn Rail as “a triumph of intention and reinvention, centering disability and celebrating Herman’s rebirth as his own divine form,” VITRUVIAN shares an allegorical tale of the life cycle of the Vitruvian man as he traverses multiple hemispheres, now in the embodiment of a Disabled Black man. Based on Da Vinci’s famous sketch, the piece explores the ways natural phenomena and history enter and live in the body.
March 1: Disability Day of Mourning
Each year, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network helps the disability community come together to remember the victims of filicide – people with disabilities killed by their family members. Vigils are held on the Day of Mourning in cities around the world. More information, including ASAN’s Anti-Filicide Toolkit, can be found here.
Incarceration and the Impossibilities of Health
The New York Times reports, with the first comprehensive data about COVID fatalities in U.S. prisons, that deaths inside state and federal facilities rose nearly 50 percent in the first year of the pandemic, surpassing even the increases at nursing homes. An “aging inmate population, a correctional staffing shortage, and ill-equipped medical personnel combined to make prisoners especially vulnerable,” write Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and Allie Pitchon.
The reporting comes as states are finding success in overturning the Medicaid’s “inmate exclusion policy” that prohibits federal dollars being spent on a person’s care in prison. The Tradeoffs podcast explains how states are trying to use Medicaid coverage as a bridge for those transitioning out of carceral settings, when they are 12 times more likely to die than the general population because of the instability of their care and coverage.
In Other News…
In an unfortunate fragmentation of the meanings of access, disabled people in Sacramento, CA are bringing a class-action lawsuit against the city and county, claiming they violated accessibility laws by failing to keep sidewalks clear from homeless encampments.
Liz Vinson of the Southern Poverty Law Center was recognized with high honors at The Anthem Awards for her 2022 reporting that documented the cruel treatment several Black men endured after participating in a peaceful protest against living conditions at the privately owned, for-profit Folkston ICE Processing Center, an immigrant prison in Georgia.
For Them, Miles Griffis reports on the lack of COVID precautions at this year’s Creating Change conference, the annual convening that has been planned by The National LGBTQ Task Force since 1988. Like many spaces now, there is mandatory masking, testing, or vaccination - and no remote access option.