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Impossible Enterprise: CETA, Ron Whyte, and The National Task Force for Disability and the Arts
March 25, 2022 @ 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Join Us for A Conversation With
PATRICK McKELVEY
(Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts, University of Pittsburgh)
and
ROBERT McRUER
(Professor of English, The George Washington University)
Friday, March 25, 2022. 4:00 –5:30 p.m.
Moderated by Mara Mills
This talk considers the changing role of performance labor in light of the disability rights and liberation movements of the 1970s. McKelvey focuses on the infrastructural activism of queer and disabled playwright Ron Whyte and examines how Whyte drew upon competing policy and activist paradigms to secure public service employment through the New York Artists Project (1978-1980), the largest of numerous federally-subsidized arts jobs programs funded through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, or CETA (1973). McKelvey demonstrates how Whyte used the material support he received through CETA to launch the National Task Force for Disability and the Arts and create a radical blueprint of infrastructural imagination focused on supporting disabled artists.
Patrick McKelvey is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in performance studies, theatre history, and disability studies. Before joining the faculty at Pitt, he received his PhD from Brown University in 2017 and taught at Florida State University’s School of Theatre from 2016 to 2018. He has published essays in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (ed. Clare Croft; Oxford, 2017). McKelvey’s 2016 essay, “Ron Whyte’s ‘Disemployment’ Prosthetic Performance and Theatrical Labor” (Theatre Survey) received three “best article” awards: from the American Society for Theatre Research, the American Theatre and Drama Society, and the Committee for LGBT History. McKelvey is currently completing his first book, Disability Works: US Performance After Rehabilitation (under review, NYU Press), and beginning work on his second, Supporting Actors: A Disability History of Theatrical Welfare from Springbrook to Broadway Cares.
Robert McRuer is a Professor of English at The George Washington University, where he teaches disability studies, queer theory, and critical theory more generally. He is the author of three books including Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (NYU, 2006) and Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance (NYU, 2018). With Anna Mollow, he is the co-editor of Sex and Disability (Duke UP, 2012).
Co-sponsors:
Tamiment Library
Grey Art Gallery
Proclaiming Disability Arts
NYU Office of Global Inclusion, Diversity, and Strategic Innovation
This is a Zoom webinar. CART and ASL are provided. (Please note: if you require captioning and ASL simultaneously, we recommend using a laptop or desktop computer, and not a tablet or smartphone.) For other accommodations, please indicate on your RSVP form.