As the world continues to transform, reconfigure, and reveal itself in the years since COVID-19 entered it, artists with disabilities have become a key voice in mapping out what the future looks like.
The COVID-19 pandemic not only was a mass-disabling event, a phrase coined by disability activist Imani Barbarin on TikTok in 2021, it also illuminated major gaps in accessibility options that existed long before COVID. Meanwhile, the national conversations around racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder have revealed new strategies for intersectionality and collaboration between different marginalized groups, including BIPOC, LGBTQ, immigrant, and disability communities.
The intersectionality between movements comes from collaboration and also shared identities of people in these communities. For instance, a study published in Health Affairs in 2022 found that after confounders were controlled for, transgender adults have a 27 percent chance of having at least one disability at age twenty, and a 39 percent chance at age 55.
Atlas Oggún Phoenix, who is organizing the TransSpace Pride Festival at the Hook & Ladder on August 10, reflects that often, people with transgender, intersex, and gender expansive identities, as well as LGBTQ individuals more broadly, often spent formative years lacking supportive environments. “We’re all dealing with some form of not having your needs met,” Phoenix said.
The festival features an intersectional swath of different artists. “Most of my cast has either a disability or multiple disabilities, “ Phoenix said. Among the performers is the Black trans rapper Zora, who has explored themes of mental health and depression in her lyrics. The event also features Transcendence Cabaret, nonbinary punk rock band TIMISAROCKER, Early Girl from Iowa City, and DJ Drew Untethered, plus the Minneapolis Fire Collective, collaborating with Taikollaborative.
Phoenix lives in the reality of having multiple identities, and often feels like an outsider because of it. “I’m actually at the intersection of being biracial, transgender, and then having the heritage of being Jewish, being Black and being disabled and having been a woman before,” Phoenix told me in an interview. “It’s just the intersection of a lot of different identities that at the end of the day always felt like I was kind of thrust back outside of them.”
Phoenix wanted to create a space where people could just be themselves. At the TransSpace Pride Festival, accessibility has been a major consideration. Phoenix chose The Hook & Ladder in part because there was lots of space for different body types, and they’ve organized to have ASL interpreters. There will be a virtual component to the event, so people can watch from home. “The idea was to create a space for people where they could make a decision for a variety of reasons whether they wanted to stay home and watch them live stream, or go into the physical space to participate in person,” Phoenix said. “Where you can kind of create your own safe bubble for yourself, and then it’s also a space that accommodates folks that are legally blind, legally have chronic pain, and a variety of other kinds of physical ailments or differently abled abilities.”
An intersectional lens is also a noteworthy feature at an exhibition on view at Mill City Museum, called “The Art of Disability Justice Now.” The exhibition is put together by a collective called AmplifyMN, and students from the University of Minnesota taking a course called Curating Disability Justice, taught by scholar-curator Jessica Cooley. AmplifyMN formed out of conversations initiated by 2021 Bush Fellow Mai Thor.
I visited the exhibition during a press event they held a couple of weeks ago. I was greeted there by writer, artist and disability advocate Alison Bergblom Johnson, who was part of the collective curating the exhibition and is also one of the featured artists.
When I talked to Bergblom Johnson about the process, she said the group sought artists who had disabilities and also were queer and/or marginalized in some other way. The show highlights artists making work “that is responsive to now,” Bergblom Johnson said, “that represents us as a community, but also is not framed as ‘the best disability art’ or definitive of the moment. We wanted to stay open.”
One piece, by Janice Essick, depicts a figure with thick eyebrows and a mustache, and big hair that reminded me a bit of Little Richard. Essick, an artist with Interact Center for Visual and Performing Arts, an organization that supports and promotes artists with disabilities, titled the work: “This is a Picture of a Lady in the Nude” (2019). Made with acrylic and ink, the piece disrupts mainstream notions of gender and also playfully engages in a kind of tease with the viewer. With a scribbled background and broad brushstrokes, Essick doesn’t show nudity in a realistic way, and yet opens up questions considering the relationship between viewer and voyeur.
Queer disabled photographer Trista Marie McGovern also explores the act of being seen vs. seeing in a triptych of photographs taken from her collection, “Where Shame Dies.” The erotic pieces allow the viewer into intimate spaces, in some cases with emblems of BDSM play. McGovern counters long-held narratives of who gets allowed to be sexy/sexual, and creates space for asking who is allowed to be vulnerable and to seek joy.
There’s a mix of disciplines represented in the exhibition— like Taja Will’s dance film, “Líneas de Sangre,” made with filmmaker Sequoia Hauck, about reclaiming queer ritual, and Zoe Cinel’s inkjet print from their “Natura Morta with Adalimumab” series. Cinel photographs a vial of an immunosuppressive drug tucked into a dying floral arrangement, with a soft, comfy pillow placed behind it. There are tactile works, like Drew Maude-Griffin’s LED-lit yarn crochet works, and Madison Elyse Rubenstein’s thick sculptural paintings, and hyperrealistic paintings by May Ling Kopecky, who documents her journey with MS.
For her own work, Bergblom Johnson shares a series of pieces she created originally for a care provider’s office. “He wanted art that made anybody of any gender identity feel like they could talk to him,” she said. The provider, who works with people with mental health challenges, chose an image where he felt people wouldn’t be able to say either way what gender the person was. Since then, Bergblom Johnson has explored the original image with Photoshop techniques.
“Part of what I’m interested in as a human who has a disability is that I cannot do everything I want to do,” she said.
Donna Ray explores similar themes in two spoon pieces she made originally for a solo show at the Minnesota African American History Museum and Gallery, which opened at the end of 2023. Ray, who has a vision disability, has been making spoons for 20 years. Her most recent spoons reference spoon theory as a point of conversation.
Written about first by Christine Miserandino, spoon theory offers a way to talk about how much energy a person has each day. “It might take one spoon, and then one spoon is all you could do that day,” Ray explained to me at the press event. “But some people take 12 spoons for the whole day. Some take one, some take two. And they can only handle just two spoons.” In her delicately sculpted spoons (reproduced with a 3-D printer for the Mill City Museum show), Ray asks the question: “What does it take for us to survive in this world?” Ray asked.
As an artist who doesn’t see, Ray has to work harder than non-disabled artists. Often, tasks that are a part of being an artist— like shipping a piece of work, hanging it, transporting herself to places she needs to be— can be very costly. She also has to pay for someone to look over her work, since she can’t do it herself. “It takes more money for us,” she said. “And it takes more courage for us to come out on our own, because we have to shield ourselves and guard ourselves and protect our own heart to what we’re doing.”
Ray told me that participating in “The Art of Disability Justice Now” has been a full circle moment. “I’m finally getting ready to do my art with other artists with different disabilities like me,” she said. While she’s worked with other organizations that support artists with disabilities in the past, this show is unique in that it’s curated by people with disabilities as well.“This actually is very good because it shows that we are well rounded,” she said.
In some ways, as more and more of the world returns to how it operated before the COVID-19 pandemic, voices from the disability community have gotten silenced in the enthusiasm to “get back to normal.” Artists with disabilities play a vital role in keeping not only their needs but others who are left out of mainstream spaces in the forefront of consideration and care.
The TransSpace Pride Festival takes place Saturday, Aug. 10 from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. at the Hook & Ladder ($15-20). More information here.
The Art of Disability Justice Now runs through Nov. 3 at the Mill City Museum (free). More information here.
Sheila Regan
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at [email protected].