January 2025
January 27, 2025 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
“Mad Studies” is an emerging interdisciplinary collaboration for transforming how we approach mental health and wellbeing. Mad studies centers the perspective of lived experience and it brings together activists, artists, concerned clinicians, and critical disability scholars. It uses these differing perspectives to liberate us from rigid categories, from single vision framings, and from the sanist prejudice. Mad studies, at its heart, realigns who gets to contribute to the conversation, research, and practice around mental difference.
February 2025
February 13, 2025 @ 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Whitney Access programs invite you to the launch of Amanda Cachia’s book, The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique. This event will celebrate the disabled and Deaf artists featured in the book, including Christine Sun Kim, and local New York-based artists Park McArthur, Finnegan Shannon, and Sughanda Gupta. The book examines how access can be a method to experience arts in a multisensory way. Crip author and art historian Amanda Cachia brings to light how our bodies take in environments in different ways and reveals how equity affects different bodies when access is not considered. Cachia will join a discussion with Whitney Associate Manager of Access Programs and Initiatives, Bojana Coklyat. After the conversation, there will be time for questions from the audience and to visit Christine Sun Kim’s exhibition, All Day All Night. Cachia will also sign copies of the book, which will be available for purchase.
February 13, 2025 @ 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Starting in the mid-1960s, Stephen Dwoskin, a UK-based experimental filmmaker who survived childhood poliomyelitis, developed a distinct audio-visual style rooted in the specific conditions of (im-)mobility that permeate his cinematography. Simultaneously, he was strongly preoccupied with the ways narrative cinema uses disability as a symbolic or iconic component. In his essay film Face of our Fear (1991), Dwoskin discusses the long history of disability mis-representation in Western art and media, highlighting the shifting meaning of disability across centuries of evolving cultural traditions.
This event features a screening of Dwoskin’s Face of our Fear (52 minutes), followed by a discussion and Q&A with Professor Rachel Garfield—a film scholar, artist, and close friend and collaborator of the late Stephen Dwoskin. Open captions and CART provided; audio description available upon request.
February 13, 2025 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Jaipreet Virdi, Mara Mills, and Sarah F. Rose introduce a disability history of science in the current volume of Osiris, which they co-edited. Across the volume, contributors trace the disabling impacts of scientific theories and practices in the contexts of war, factory labor, insurance, and colonialism; others excavate racial and settler ableism in the history of scientific facts, protocols, and collections; still others query the boundaries between scientific, lay, and disability expertise. Contending that disability alters method, the volume’s authors bring new sources and interpretation techniques to the history of science, overturn familiar narratives, apply disability analyses to established terms and archives, and discuss accessibility issues for disabled historians.
February 24, 2025 @ 6:00 pm – 7:15 pm
This panel takes its title from Douglas Crimp’s famous 1989 essay written at the height of the AIDS crisis, which argued for the need for both militant activism and collective mourning. How might our current moment similarly demand an attention to collective grief and care, organizing and activism? This conversation brings together artists and activists, Dean Spade, Amitis Motevalli, Yin Q, and Viva Ruiz, to consider the aesthetic and political strategies they find most necessary to combat the violent curtailing of bodily autonomy faced by queer/trans communities in particular.
March 2025
March 5, 2025 @ 7:00 pm
Espacio de Culturas at KJCC is thrilled to screen Por donde pasa el silencio, nominated for Best New Director at the Goya Awards, followed by a discussion with the film’s director, Sandra Romero.
March 21, 2025 @ 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
This program brings together artists and writers Seth Kim-Cohen, Jeffrey Yasuo Mansfield, Park McArthur, and Mara Mills for a conversation on the occasion of Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night. As contributors to the exhibition catalogue, they will share their responses to Christine Sun Kim’s work and engage in a conversation about sign language aesthetics, mediumship, competing temporalities, and Deaf methods.
April 2025
April 22, 2025 @ 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm
The Remote Access Archive is a crowdsourced, community-based and digital archive. It documents the ways that disabled people and communities have used technology for remote forms of participation, both before and during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This event includes an overview of remote access, its promises, and frictions, as well as an in-depth exploration of how the Critical Design Lab created the archive.
April 24, 2025 @ 12:30 pm – 1:45 pm
A multi-discipline, multimedia guide to abolition through the lens of healthcare and medicine – featuring writings and artwork from 10+ incarcerated and post-detention activists
Exposing how marginalized communities are vilified by “carceral safety” systems, educators and health justice advocates Carlos Martinez and Ronica Mukerjee call for a radical break with reformist strategies in favor of ones grounded in grassroots organizing and abolition.
This panel brings together author and contributors, Ronica Mukerjee, Onyinye Alheri, Leroy Moore, moderated by Pato Hebert.
April 24, 2025 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Intimacy Violation: screening of a work-in-progress film by Yining Chi, followed by a participatory performance around audio description led by the artist and a discussion moderated by Meesh Sara Fradkin.
April 24, 2025 @ 8:00 pm
ISSUE is proud to present AIR CHANGE PER HOUR, the first commission from 2025 Artist-In-Residence Anna RG that interrogates relationships between sound, space, and accessibility in the context of airborne safety. Rooted in the ongoing realities of the pandemic, this work challenges expectations of silence in performance spaces by embracing the presence of air purifiers—not just as functional access objects, but as sonic, conceptual and political agents within the room.
April 29, 2025 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Please join The Center for Disability Studies, and book editors Mara Mills, Harris Kornstein, Faye Ginsburg, and Rayna Rapp to celebrate the publication of How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic with refreshments and brief readings by some of the book’s authors.
April 30, 2025 @ 12:00 pm
David Serlin in conversation with Mara Mills and Sophie Gonick. Moderated by Andrew Ross.
Window Shopping with Helen Keller recovers a series of influential moments when architects and designers engaged the embodied experiences of people with disabilities. David Serlin reveals how people with sensory and physical impairments navigated urban spaces and helped to shape modern culture. Through four case studies – the lives of Joseph Merrick (aka “The Elephant Man”) and Helen Keller, the architectural and design projects of the Works Progress Administration, and Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman’s design for the Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped – Serlin offers a new history of modernity’s entanglements with disability.
May 2025
May 16, 2025 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
The editors of the volume “Crip Authorship: Disability as Method”, Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez, have brought together a variety of disabled positions on the topic of “authorship”: The contributions ask how disability and authorship are aesthetically and structurally connected and influence each other. Together with some of the authors, this time they focus on the topic of translation. This discussion is a part of The Performative Book Fair by Kampnagel.