Disabled Artist Symposium, 4/23/25

]The fourth annual 2025 Disabled Artist Symposium, a free hybrid event on Zoom and at the Illinois State University Multicultural Center, took place on April 23, from noon-1:30 p.m. central time. This year's participating artists were Sonia Boué, Xixi Edelsbrunner, Carly Riegger, Ezra Benus, Megan Bent, and Alx Velozo.

The event was sponsored by the Multicultural Center, the Center for Civic Engagement, Student Access and Accommodations Services, the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, the Wonsook Kim College of Fine Arts, and the Wonsook Kim School of Art, all at Illinois State University.

Disabled Artist Symposium, April 23, 2025. Featuring artists Megan Bent, Ezra Benus, Sonia Boué, Xixi Edelsbrunner, Alx Velozo, and Carly Riegger. Moderated by Bert Stabler. CART caption transcript below.

Supplementary links, slides, image descriptions here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RJoWxZ-ixKEnxvCUHpUvcOQMlFZ5atGSaElj9RK1M84/edit?usp=sharing

CART CAPTION TRANSCRIPT (with some corrections):

Disabled Artist Symposium 2025

Illinois State University

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Bert Stabler:  Welcome everybody.  The room I'm in is sparsely populated.  It will fill up as everyone comes in.  Hello to everyone on Zoom. 

I will quickly share a Google Docs link with the artist bios and remarks and a link to my blog.  I've interviewed two of the artists so far.  Let me get started. 

Welcome to the fourth annual Disabled Artist Symposium.  I'm Albert Stabler, nearsighted and neurodivergent. I'm an assistant professor of art education at Illinois state university.  I'm a skinny, middle aged white man with brown hair, a graying beard, and glasses, wearing a purple plaid shirt. 

This event is taking place on Zoom as well as a physical space at the multicultural center at Illinois state university. 

This year's participating artists will be Sonia Boué, Xixi Edelsbrunner, Carly Riegger, Ezra Benus, Megan Bent, and Alx Velozo.This event is sponsored by the multicultural center, center for student engagement, women's gender and sexuality studies program, the Won Sook Kim College of fine arts and the Won Sook Kim School of arts. 

I shared a link in the chat with information on the presentations and artists as well as my blog.  The recording and transcript will be posted in a short while.  We have captioning this year.  It will give us a very good transcript.  Sorry if anyone was counting on ASL which was promised. 

I'll briefly read the acknowledgement from the Won Sook Kim school of art.

I will briefly read the life, labor, and land acknowledgement from the Wonsook Kim School of Art at Illinois State University.

The Wonsook Kim School of Art acknowledges the African diaspora violently robbed of life, labor, land, safety, community, culture, and dignity during and after slavery. We also acknowledge those violently robbed of life, labor, land, safety, community, culture, and dignity through sexuality, gender, race, wealth, language, and ability hierarchies. These hierarchies are and have been sustained by a range of power formations, including the state.

The Wonsook Kim School of Art acknowledges that the Illinois State University, the Center for the Visual Arts, and all we do, takes place on the land of multiple native nations. These lands were once home to the Illini, Peoria and the Myaamia, and later due to colonial encroachment and displacement to the Fox, Potawatomi, Sauk, Shawnee, Winnebago, Ioway, Mascouten, Piankashaw, Wea, and Kickapoo Nations. We strive to honor the ongoing legacies of these and other indigenous peoples who may have been excluded in this acknowledgement due to historical inaccuracy and erasure.

We strive to honor their ongoing legacies.  We will begin the artist presentations.  We'll go in alphabetical order.  The first to share work will be Megan Bent. 

Megan Bent (she/her) is a lens-based artist interested in the ways image-making can happen beyond traditional methods. She is drawn to processes that reflect and embrace her disabled experience, especially interdependence, impermanence, care, and slowness. Her work has been exhibited domestically and abroad at venues including The U.N. Headquarters, NY, NY; Root Division, San Francisco, CA; form & concept, Santa Fe, NM; F1963, Busan, South Korea; and Fotonostrum, Barcelona, Spain. She was a recent recipient of the 2023 Wynn Newhouse Awards. Her work has been featured in Lenscratch, Analog Forever Magazine, Fraction Magazine, Too Tired Project, Rfotofolio, and Float Photography Magazine.

Megan Bent:  Thank you so much for inviting us and creating this space.  I'll start by sharing my screen. 

Hi, my name is Megan Bent. I am a disabled artist. I am Zooming in from Rhode Island, unceded Narragansett lands. I am a white woman with a round face, long brown hair with thick bangs, blue eyes, and a black tank top. I have flower tattoos on my right shoulder. For context, some of my disabilities that I will share today are neurodivergence and arthritis in my right leg in my early 20s, which was later diagnosed as autoimmune arthritis.  

Entanglement

Slide 1

Description - two black vinyl lines on the wood floor of the gallery lead into a complex map of black vinyl lines that cover the floors, walls, and windows of the gallery. Dispersed along the walls of the gallery are square shelves, each shelf has an iPad inlaid into it, playing a video on loop

• Arthritis in my hip was creating intense, chronic pain. When the ACA passed, I could finally get hip replacement surgery - for context, the ACA took away the barrier to health coverage for having a “Pre-existing condition”

• Vinyl map on walls, floors, and windows is 79 days of walking before, during, and after hip replacement surgery

Slide 2

Description - a 2x4 grid of film stills in the installation. They all show snippets of me walking filmed from the waist down. I am walking with various mobility devices and unassisted. 

• The videos were not shown in a linear order, but shared as a connected network of experiences. Highlighting how disability and illness are not static.

Slide 3:

Description - a view of the gallery from the outside. The front wall of the gallery is all windows. The vinyl lines on the walls and windows overlap and intersect. A person in the gallery stands in front of one of the videos watching it. 

• The map was informed by my research into the etymology of the word normal and its connection to the eugenics movement

• The map in the gallery debunks the idea of normal - all experiences of walking are entangled and inform each other; it's a continuum

• I made the decision that to watch the movie, you approach the shelf and look down, and my legs become your legs 

Latency

Slide 4:

Image: On the left is an image of a contact print frame exposing in the sun, I am printing an X-ray of my cervical spine on a leaf. On the right is the finished leaf after exposure. 

• Chlorophyll printing - a process where images are printed onto leaves by photosynthesis. It was invented by the photographer Binh Danh

• disability is a natural part of diversity

• Some of my writing from this project: the imagery in Latency explores stigma, the medicalized body, and companionship. Printing our medical imagery reclaims our agency as patients. I create these images with love and care, and in the process, the parts of us seen as deficient in the medical world are transformed into living, temporal pieces of beauty. 

Slide 5: 

Description - chlorophyll prints of Richard III’s spine on an oval-shaped hydrangea leaf. The spine shows curvature, and is a photo from when his grave was excavated. On the left is the leaf when it was first printed in 2019, and on the right is the leaf in 2024. The leaf is aging, in 2024 it is more ubmer and the bottom tip of the leaf has broken off. 

• Paul K Longmore identified 3 main stereotypes of disability representation in the media. The villain, the monster, and the inspiration

• I made this piece to talk about the villain stereotype - in Shakespeare's play, Richard’s disability is exaggerated to signify his moral deviance

• Feel like we are in a moment where ableism is ramping up and MAHA is villainizing disability

• Leaves are aging- a decision I made at the start to have the leaves go through aging, highlighting our shared impermanence 

• When I  exhibit the work, I share the pair of prints -  the original scan of the leaf with the aging leaf, again blending time - 

Recent:

Slide 9:  A chlorophyll print of my father on an elephant ear leaf, a close up side portrait of a white man with glasses. The left is the leaf when first printed in 2018 and the right is the leaf in 2023. 

• My relationship to the subject matter also evolves over time, passing. For example, I made this photo of my Dad when his hair was growing back after chemo, and we chlorophyll printed it as his melanoma metastasized. I always thought this leaf would disappear before  - but my Dad passed away in 2023, about 2 years ago. And it has been both hard and beautiful that this leaf of our collaboration remains after his passing. 

Two recent works in progress. On the right is a b&w photogram of a medical gauze sleeve. I have etched lines into the photo emulsion, the lines create a cocoon around the the gauze. On the right is a black and white linoleum block print of two clusters of swirling and overlapping lines.

This new work reflects the complexities of grief from losing my father after his cancer returned and after numerous denials of the healthcare he needed. 

While my anger at a system designed to fail him is part of my grief, so is the depth of love I learned from being his advocate and caregiver.  

With the photograms, like on the right, I have been printing the care objects left after his passing. Being one of his full-time caregivers was one of the hardest but most meaningful things I have ever done. It made us even closer and taught me about the depths of love I didn’t know existed. 

The linoblock prints are drawings my dad made in the final weeks of his life. He had never just drawn before this. They feel like his final communications with us when his words could no longer form.

I have been going back to those drawings, retracing them, carving them into lino blocks. It is a meditation, a way to commune with him. To bring his energy to the present of my mind and heart and across space and time.

I also feel these recent works are connected to the line work I shared in the beginning. Lines as a visual language, a way of mapping connections across time and space. So these are ideas, feelings, and experiences I plan to keep exploring. And plan to turn it into another site-specific installation.

Thank you for the chance to share this with all of you. 

Bert Stabler:  If you have questions and thoughts, please share them in the chat.  We should have time at the end of the presentations for conversation.  I'm putting a link back in the chat with the artist bios and slides. 

Now I'll read the bio for our next artist, Ezra.  I presume Ezra is on Zoom. 

Hi!  Ezra is an artist, educator and curator based in Brooklyn. 

They have exhibited at Print Center New York, BRIC, Perlman Teaching Museum, NYU Gallatin Gallery, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Dedalus Foundation, EFA Project Space, The Shed, and internationally with Shape Arts, Museion, MMK Frankfurt, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Art Gallery Windsor, Migros Museum. Ezra has received support as an Art Matters Foundation Artist2Artist Fellowship, and had residencies with Art Beyond Sight’s Art + Disability Residency, Wave Hill Winter Workspace, EFA SHIFT Residency, BRIClab Contemporary Art.

Ezra is also one half of Brothers Sick (with Noah Benus), a sibling artistic collaboration steeped in explorations of disability justice, politics and histories of illness, spirituality, Jewishness, and care.

Their work has been featured in art publications such as Artforum, Pin Up, Mousse Magazine, Ocula, Art Agenda, Publico ípsilon, and Welt Kunst.

Welcome, Ezra. 

Ezra Benus:  I will share as well.  I am a white person with black curly hair on top, a little short on the sides.  I have a more pronounced moustache as facial hair but shaded all around.  I am wearing a blue and white striped button-up.  I am sitting in my apartment in Brooklyn, New York. 

On the screen, I have a white background with my name.  Objects, ritual, pain, pleasure, Jewishness.  Those are the keywords throughout the presentation. 

Bert Stabler:  If anybody is not muted, please mute. 

Ezra Benus:  I have more slides than I will go through.  I will share briefly about some of the work.  I looked at objects related to disability culture, looking at the colors of medication I took everyday.  That was my color palate.  From left to right, the colors are: pink, blue, orange, tan, light green, red, and grey.  There are different color prisms flowing and crashing. 

"When the sun rises and you feel stuck

When the sun sets and you feel release

When the moon shines and you feel throbbing

When the moon fades and you too fade"

These were my rituals, taking medication over time.  We structure a lot of time around celestial bodies in the Jewish culture.  We also have Shabbat.  Ritual happens through a disability time perspective and our reliance on objects in our world.  The structure of the week is mostly concerned with work.  Shabbat is a day of rest.  That is a really interesting tension to bring up. 

On the left, we have an image of a grey shower chair with a light blue heating pad on top.  On top of that layer is an orange square painting.  On top of that is a magic wand massager, dangling from the ceiling. 

"Here we find care as joy

Here we find pain as joy

Here we find pleasure as pain

Here we find pain as pleasure

Here we know pain and pleasure and rest

Here we find disability/sickness/illness as ritual. 

(Note to visitor: Please take care, use objects as needed and wanted.)

This is titled You Shall Rejoice.  On this holiday, Sukkot, we talk about rejoicing.  I thought about joy and the opposite of joy, which is pain.  We don't always choose pain, but sometimes we choose it as pleasure.  Bringing in the objects of pleasure and pain, offering ourselves pain and pleasure through objects like sex toys and massagers. 

This is a clip of someone using their massager on their back while sitting.  They are also using a heating pad. 

The next image is of a large white gallery room with a protruding structure from the wall and ceiling.  On the front-facing panel, it says RELAX.  Below that is a detailed shot from the large structure.  It shows three facedown bedpans.  One is in green and the other are white and stainless steel, kidney-shaped.  There is a still image of a magic wand massager touching the ground.  This piece is called Relax (Erotic Hypnosis).

We will see a short clip of the magic wand massager moving on the ground. 

This piece is dealing with the objects we use in the disability culture.  The bedpan is related to piss and shit and blood.  These are all vintage.  The green one is from a brand in the 1950s called Relax.  There is the command to relax.  Calling a bedpan line "Relax" was really interesting to me.  We have all been in places where we are told to relax and that is not welcome but enraging.  But also think about laxative and relaxing the bowels.  Think about your body in that state.  The magic wand is a mode to relax through orgasmic pleasure.  Think about the tension and the things related to pain or pleasure or that connection between the two. 

The objects we use in our private spaces are supposed to be kept private and often not shared.  Bringing those things into art spaces, though we are told they are gross, can defy genderism and racialism and ableism.  We all piss and shit and give blood, so it brings it to the foreground. 

Bert Stabler:  Were you trying to show us the Tree of Life piece?  You are doing fine on time. 

Ezra Benus:  Yes. 

This brings me to the next piece that talks through the idea of the objects related to the care that is commonly seen as private or gross.  All of these objects are things I have engaged with in my life.  Those shifting needs related to care and bodies and all of that.  A lot of the time, people use objects as full metaphor and the material reality of life.  That is a delineation I try to preface. 

On the right, there is an image of ten stainless steel bedpans fixed to the wall in a formation akin to a tree or looking like a mapping onto the body.  Each of the bedpans is adhered to the wall using tension from various colored tourniquets.  Those are used for inserting needles into the arm or blood-drawing transfusions. 

This is called the Sefirot or Tree of Life.  We are all this tree of life and connected to the larger sublime.  I thought about the connectivity to our bodies and engage in spirituality.  That thought of blood and shit and piss that flow through us while grounding us in the world.  It brings us in these spaces of spirituality that are divinity to me. 

I use "grossness" as a reclamation.  This is a part of our lives that is divine.   Here I am putting this idea to that concept, along with the space between pain and pleasure.  These are bound to the wall.  Binding is related to kink and BDSM, especially as latex objects.  I think about how that overlaps with medicalized care as well.  This piece is reflecting on to that. 

This is an older work of me getting an infusion.  It shows two sets of two hands.  The arms are a nurse's nitrile gloved hands, swabbing and putting a needle into my arm.  There is a rock-on symbol or a death power symbol. 

This is a set of prints that were used as takeaways, so people could take this home with them.  This was one of a few that I was making related to that private space of infusions that I would go to over time.  These were taken during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.  The only touch I was receiving was in medical care.  I related that to eroticism and touch, the ways that disability and intimacy is a complex thing.  Those spaces can be really violent with hints of eroticism.  I think about that as we fold the ways in which all of these things exist.  Pain and pleasure.  Violence and care.  That is in a lot of the work I am interested in. 

On the right, we see photowork that I made using a scanner.  On the left, there is a gloved nitrile hand in blue.  This is entangled with black and brown leather straps.  These are worn during prayer and bounded to a person's arm.  On the right side of the photo is a blue tourniquet that is mostly flat.  On the top center is another syringe, next to a red box with text meaning "on the head."  There is a golden Star of David with the year 1916 at the center. 

This work is called Bodiless At The Bimah.  We reflected with the overlaps of time and ritual and violence.  I think there is something that I keep addressing in my work related to bridging time and space.  That will be shown in the last work as well. 

Here, it is a collaborative work with my brother Noah.  On the left is a large wall that shows a singular image print that is repeated many times.  It looks infinite.  The image is a repetitive image, black and white doubled set of hands in a supplicated motion, two on the bottom and two on the top pointing to the center.  One arm has tubing wrapped around from intravenous treatment.   That is a black triangle.  There is Hebrew text that translates to "forever and forever." 

The work is called "for the world eternal".  There was a way the Nazis used to mark the "unsociable", demarcating the first people to be killed.  Those were my ancestors.  I was binding myself to the tubing in the medicalized context I live in.  Using this repetitive image where queer people, Jewish people, and disabled people are still here and will be here forever.  I want to hold that. 

This is another example of that relationship between spirituality and pain and pleasure and kink and BDSM through the wrapping and binding and sublime. 

I will leave us with that.  I appreciate everyone listening to this presentation. 

Bert Stabler:  Thank you so much, Ezra.  Very powerful image to close with.  I just shared the link to those slides in text. 

Next up is Sonia. 

Sonia Boué is a multiform neurodivergent Anglo-Spanish artist and Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award nominee 2024. Her practice explores the dualities of neurodivergence and a heritage of forced migration and exile, leading to a BBC Radio 4 programme and Tate Britain short film. Through a series of Arts Council England awards, Boué has articulated a process of autistic identity transition for a generation, culminating in the publication of Neurophototherapy: Playfully Unmasking with Photography and Collage (2023).

Boué is also a writer, an experienced guest lecturer and a consultant. She has worked with the Plus Tate Network, the Tate disAbility Network, the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College, the City Lit/National Gallery, the Royal Society of Sculptors, the National Portrait Gallery, the V&A, and the Wellcome Collection. She is currently an A-N Artist Board Member and National Disability Arts Collection & Archive (NDACA) acquisitions committee member.

Welcome, Sonia. 

Sonia Boué:  Thank you so much to the previous speakers.  I could listen to you both all day.  That was amazing. 

I'm a white person with salt and pepper hair cut in a mid length mullet.  I'm wearing glasses and a baby blue sweater.  I'm in front of my bookcase which has colleges on it. 

I'm neurodivergent.  I'm having to compose myself because I'm a bit scattered so excuse if there is a disconnect between my images and words. 

I scripted myself but may go off script.  I'll start sharing my screen. 

I'm beaming to you from the UK.  It's about 6:30 in the evening here. 

I'm a late discovered neurodivergent .  As a child my family lived in political exile due to the Spanish civil war.  My first slide is an image of myself with my pronouns, she/her. 

On to the second slide.  The experience of political exile formed my research for many years.  I've mentioned the short film about the Spanish civil war:  Felicia Browne: Unofficial War Artist in 2015, the Arts Council England funded project Through An Artist’s Eye in 2016, and a BBC Radio 4 programme, The Art of Now: Return to Catalonia in 2018.

I won't do the left and rights since they won't be the same. 

Bert Stabler:  It's not mirrored. 

Sonia Boué:  So that's a shot of me in my studio in 2015 with some landscapes in the background.  Next to it is a project. 

The short film was made in 2016.  It involved paintings and poetry.  The painting is a green and brown landscape with an aerial view and a purply-blue stripe. 

The links to all of the projects and commissions are provided in a document if you're interested.  You can listen to it.  I've given the producer's link.  I don't know if you can access it on the BBC. 

In 2016, I was diagnosed with autism and that added another dimension to my work.  I tried to write an early access template in tribute to a British artist lost in the Spanish Civil War: Through An Artist’s Eye.  There were not many people talking about access needs for autistic neurodivergent people in the UK at the time. 

My third slide is about the NUNO project.  I began to specialize in creating publicly funded projects on neuro-inclusive subjects.  Writing is a core activity through which I navigate, reflect on and seek to impact the visual arts.   An ambitious participatory project called NUNO followed in 2018-2019, and NUNO Project writings were subsequently published in Developments in Neuroethics and Bioethics, vol 5 (2022). This text proposes radical early templates for neuro-inclusive work and neurodivergent leadership. I was invited to workshop the NUNO Project with the Tate disABILITY Network just before the pandemic.NUNO was subsequently published in a journal on Bio Ethics.  There are radical templates for neuro-inclusive works. 

My slides show a few different facets of the project.  There are intersecting lines like a spider's web and some text.   "Brain Within Falling Through."  It's like fracturing identity.  It was created by a mentee of mine, Naomi Morris.  There is also an evaluation document on the right with an image of a red door and a sculpture with a vintage telephone receiver on a leather suitcase. 

That's an example of how I like to create my project and then disseminate my research from the project as well. 

COVID lockdowns helped coalesce my experiences and my heritage.  Previously my neurodivergence was more subtextual.  It all culminated in this publication with six late diagnosed autistic women: Neurophototherapy: Playfully Unmasking with Photography and Collage.

The images are from the website and include all the different elements of the project.  It includes a gallery.  The project is about exploring identity through a life review, reenacting photographs and using personal archival materials.  It allows someone to flip the narrative on the story and do a negative stigmatizing, like inner voices they may carry with them. 

The other image is the front cover of the book.  That's a photograph of myself as a child.  I'm laughing ecstatically and holding a blue plastic spear.  I'm wearing a colorful dress, which I remember being very scratchy. 

The image from the website is myself as a young person and then as I am now.  They're in conversation with each other, among the ivy.  I'm penning a love letter to my former self.  The book is a love letter to late discovery. 

The same year I was commissioned to write Autistics at Work.  I developed this at the University of Kent in South England.  Most of the work is available as a free download.  When I get public funding I like to open-source materials to give as much back to the places I have been to and discoveries I've happened upon. 

My studio space is extremely important in fulfilling my artistic need for solitude.  I also engage in the politics of it.  Participation in online practice. 

This is a film still from The Artist is not Present.  There were 30 artists included.  The project was called We Are Invisible We are Visible.  Among all of the artists, I was the only one to propose livestream since I could not be present in the gallery.  It was originally an Instagram Live.  It was also filmed in the studio by my mentee, Naomi, whose work you saw for NUNO. 

I archived the Instagram Lives.  Then created a short film of the footage Naomi took.  The film is about restricting the viewer's vision.  It's critiquing and commenting on the neurotypical gaze from Marina Abramovic's performance, The Artist is Present. 

There's a lot to say about this work.  It's ongoing. 

My last slide . . . oh, I have not done this quite in the right way, have I?  At the time, I feel I've developed "neurodiver-gently."  Meaning I'm working with my native neurology and that of my participants.  It's most evident in my recent installations. 

Look Well After Yourself is a very complex work.  It was created in 2024.  To make them, I had to withdraw for extended periods to stim so I could work with the themes of exile and displacement.  I think this is my most autistic work to date. 

Would you like me to go back and describe the film still from The Artist is Not Present? 

Bert Stabler:  Maybe you can save that.  Your slides have been shared. 

Sonia Boué:  So these are 100 hand-made woolen forms with a pom-pom structure but they're not really pom-poms.  It's elevating the form to associate it with a lesser form of making.  It's about slowing things down, spending hours going round and round to do an enormous amount of trimming to get the pom-poms to sit the way they do on the steel supports.  They're held in a cup form at the top, they are not attached.  They sat in a gallery space like that for three months and came to no harm which was wonderful.  There was anxiety about whether to attach them to the forms.  It was a perfect metaphor.  The pom-poms are stand-ins for exiled children so there is a bit of history behind it. 

The commission was to work with child refugees evacuated from Spain in 1937.   4000 children came and were taken in by the population of the UK though the government did not want them.  They were given homes in North England.  So the world connects to the history of the children.  The idea of the pom-poms came from the archives.  So it's very complicated.  I share it here because it's my most recent work but also because of the stimming element.  Trying to encode wellbeing into a work so it's reflected by a work that is not about disability but speaks to making it accessible.  It's a completely embodied piece of work. 

Bert Stabler:  This is wonderful.  Is it okay for us to move on? 

It's 12:55.  We'll move along.  If you want to check out the slides and links to our artists, we have three more.  If anyone has to go, feel free to alert me. 

Our next artist is XiXi Edelsbrunner. 

Xixi Edelsbrunner is a multimedia artist and transplant to Los Angeles, California, where they exert and live an abundantly domestic life. Their practice is sustained by an affinity for objects—particularly the generic, boring, and mass-produced. It attends to trickery, inspection, utility, and sensuality. Edelsbrunner belongs to Queer Spa Network, a social practice collective that organizes spa-themed public programming and care work. They received an MFA in Fine Arts from Otis College and a BA in Mathematics from Williams College. Exhibitions include CSULB, Long Beach; Coaxial Arts, Los Angeles; Proxy Gallery, Los Angeles and Houston; California Center for the Arts, Escondido.3

Xixi Edelsbrunner:  Thank you for that introduction and for inviting me here today. 

To describe myself, I am a mixed white and East Asian transmasculine person.  And I am reclining in bed. 

Let me share my screen.  Sorry, there was a bit of a lag.  I thought there was an interaction happening.  Is it a full window for you? 

Bert Stabler:  No, but we can see your slides on the side.  Now you are full. 

Xixi Edelsbrunner:  The first work I wanted to show you today was this one, Untitled (Long Greige Sculpture) from 2022.  It is a very long, freestanding sculpture made up of mostly 1" aluminum tubes. 

This was my early work looking at the aesthetic attributes of medical and mobility objects.  More largely, these are generic objects and institutional architectures and objects that make up environments.  I was working with this color greige (between grey and beige) as a representative or common character in the aesthetics that are so neutral as to be a sore thumb.  To that end, I am lucky that the gallery spaces look the way they do.  They are institutional but have this quite present neutrality. 

In my practice, I play with the found object as something that is legible vs. not legible.  The pretending to be found or to be made. 

The second series that I wanted to show is the monochrome series I have been doing since 2023.  These are small, smooth plastic sculptures that appear abstract.  They are actually poured polyurethane into plastic packaging that encapsulates a lot of consumer items.  I am interested in that space between the legible object and the thing that is hovering just above, displaying and protecting that thing.  It is designed very specifically and particularly to each consumer object, but designed to not be legible as designed or not having an identity.  I am also thinking about generic objects here and the particularities of plastic, mass-produced things and the aesthetic quality. 

The last piece I wanted to show you is The Choice Is Yours from 2024.  It is a distortive wall piece with a small hole in the middle.  When displayed in a gallery setting, it has a small light shining through the hole.  You can see that light shining through.  Generally, the viewer will go to inspect the piece close enough that it is mirroring the piece.  Then they can see there is a spike pointing straight toward their eye.  Additionally, there is a play on still knowing and not knowing that the danger is there.  It is hard to focus on the spike at this distance. 

I was thinking about notions of surprise and traps and jump scares.  Revenge and rage.  This is moreso in the realm of my current body of work, working more with these notions. 

I was glad that Megan mentioned the disabled villain as an archetype earlier.  That is a figure I am really interested in.  The title of the piece comes from the Saw film series.  It has one of these villains that I would refer to as embittered, crippled villain.  The embitterment is important to me. 

I wanted to show an installation shot that includes this piece and a few other wall hangings and a medical waiting room chair with casters on it.  This piece, The Choice Is Yours, is the only hanging that I put at the gallery standard viewing height.  That 5' eyeline.  Everything else is something I hang at a lower eyeline that is more or less my sitting eyeline. 

I will also include these chairs on casters that I don't currently define as pieces.  They are an excess consideration seating as a gesture to the ominous wheelchair and an offering to anyone who did not bring their own seat.  They can see the rest of the show as it was hung from that vantage. 

Thank you so much. 

Bert Stabler:  That is fantastic.  An excellent chance to move on to another artist who uses the full installation space.  We will skip alphabetical order for the last couple artists.  Here is Alx Velozo. 

Alx Velozo is a trans and disabled sculptress, educator, and performance artist raised in Timucua Lands (occupied North Florida) and currently residing in Piscataway lands (occupied Baltimore). Velozo's installations and performances combine cultural imaginations of illness, touch, kink, the medical industrial complex, and kinesthetic learning models. They explore this research through mold-making processes, workshop and pedagogical facilitation, and movement and object-based performances. They received an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Velozo has exhibited, taught, and facilitated workshops in New York, Jersey City, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Miami and internationally in Canada, Mexico, and New Zealand.

Welcome, Alx. 

Alx Velozo:  I just feel so honored to be part of this lineup.  It has been a joy listening to those who have spoken already and to anticipate the next person.  Thank you Car for shifting. 

I'll visually describe myself and then three bodies of work.  I hope you all are making choices that feel good for your body.  An hour and a half Zoom is long.  Stretch and do whatever you want. 

I'm a white transgender person with dark brown hair.  I have short and long parts of my hair.  I'm in my room also reclining on a hidden couch behind me.  It's like a light key-lime green.  There's a bookshelf behind me.  I'm wearing a black and brown speckled shirt.  Also, on the back of it, across my shoulders, it spells out Undiagnosable.  I like to wear it to medical appointments. 

I'll share my screen now.  Let me know if you need me to slow down.  Make a signal or come off mute. 

The first piece on the screen next to my nameplate is a U-shaped graphite colored tube in the center of the image with symmetric looping shadows falling from it onto the white wall.  The grab bar is connected to the wall with sky blue rubber hardware.

Moving on to a few other images.  It's important to know that everything I'm sharing in this presentation is tactile.  Audiences are invited to physically engage with installed pieces.  Also, I'm always excited to collaborate on how to do tours and make it known audiences are welcome to touch. 

On the left, the graphite sculpture has three weaving tubes bent in various directions.  There is sky blue rubber at each point they meet the wall.  There are six points of contact.  To the side is a larger piece that touches the ground.  The tubes have round, rubber, marbleized sky blue hardware where they meet the wall or ground. 

This body of work references architectural access indicators that I think of when moving through a space and look for any trace of how a disabled person is invited or relegated or controlled.  Often we're relegated to the margins.  Part of that is the imagination of space in architecture.  It's to the margins and almost never a social disability model.  Few instances occur where there is imagination that we would be together moving ways beyond survival, like getting up and down from shitting in a bathroom, or traversing stairs. 

I live inside an experience of multiple chronic illnesses.  I'm a cane user and use a rollator.  Those are my frequent access devices, along with other ways I have figured out with others.

This work was develolped as a way to start troubling this notion of Us - disabled communities.  How to trouble only getting a basic indicator of "are you going to survive a space?"  Instead thinking through dance and movement and things that start to incorporate a wider range of possibilities for people that require support, to have a wider range of movements imagined. 

Something I found in trying to make a short but meaningful talk, dance and scoring is part of almost all of the work I'm showing.  I think it's coming from a way I feel -  both a lot of liberation, joy and pleasure, and also a way I deal with pain.  Dance is part of that.  It also has consistently been a connection to my queerness and my gender.  Coming up in queer clubs and dance spaces informs how I know myself, and how I move with my access devices, and before I was dependent on them, and how I deal with my changing ability and my flaring body.  I use dance and movement for that. 

In these works, the idea of a material score comes up.  I'm borrowing the idea of score from dance scores, how choreographers and musicians talk about score.  I'm fascinated with the notion there is not a standardized score in dance and movement making. 

I got curious:  I can't find any scores that would show how I would move, or that show the mark of my access devices.  I can't stand for more than a handful of minutes without an access device.  A third imprint is how I will leave a trace of my body, rather than a bipedal situation. 

Bert Stabler:  Can we jump to Car?  I don't know if our CART person can stay beyond the time.  Sorry!  It's Crip-time.  Everyone's slides are shared and I will share them again.  I want to make sure Car has a few minutes to share their work. 

Alx Velazo:  Of course!  Thank you so much for your time and attention.  Thank you for coming.  There were so many friends in the room. 

Bert Stabler:  Excuse me!  I never know how to cut people off.  Let's talk about Car. 

Carly “Car” Riegger (they/them) is a chronically ill and disabled artist from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Since finding clay, they have been able to express their illness in ways that words could not. Their artwork naturally merged with their experiences with disability. Car received a BFA in Ceramics from Bowling Green State University in 2020. They completed a Post-Baccalaureate in Ceramics at Indiana University-Southeast in 2023. Their biggest project included a panel and exhibition called #CripClay which was featured at NCECA in Cincinnati, OH in 2023. This exhibition included all artists with disabilities, which was the first of its kind at the conference. Car is also the recipient of the 2024 Midwest Artists with Disabilities Award. Currently, they are pursuing an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Both Car’s artwork and career goals involve disability inclusion and rights. They are working to expand how the arts communities work with artists with disabilities and how disability communities utilize art to express complex disabled ideas.

Thank you, Car, for being with us. 

Carly Riegger:  I go by Car.  I use they/them pronouns.  I am a white non-binary with a pink mullet.  I have round glasses and face piercings.  I am currently in Madison, Wisconsin in Ho-Chunk Land. 

I hope that people can see this now.  Just reiterate, I am currently finishing my MFA.  I am showing my most current work as I am finally getting somewhere.  I also have an MA in Disability Studies.  That came about because I felt like I lacked the words around my disability and my experience.  It was hard to explain what I was trying to do in art. 

This piece is called Uncontained.  It is a porcelain arm hanging from medical tubing from the ceiling.  There is a glass IV bag that is sculpted and contains water, also hanging.  They are connected through an IV and a needle that is dropping water and the arm drips onto the floor. 

It is a time-based piece as it slowly drains on the pillow.  The pillow catches the impression of the water.  It has been interesting to watch people slow down because the drop is pretty slow, especially from the hand.  People slow their piece as they have to see it drip.  I am thinking about crip-time and having the experience of waiting. 

This piece in ceramics usually means you don't want a leaky vessel.  Here, you actually want one.  It is similar to what others have talked about today.  

This next piece is called Gasp.  I am pushing the boundaries of glass and ceramic.  They don't normally work together.  I take the ceramic forms and test the limit with glass.  This piece is blown into the center of the ceramic piece. 

There is a ceramic ribcage that is handmade with a big glass bubble thrown into the center.  A different mode of how it sits on top of a giant pillow stack instead of a pedestal.  This is another way I have thought about breaking the institutional boundary.  I want to get away from using the things giving to me like a pedestal.  I am thinking about what a crip world looks like. 

I view this as a passage of time because of how they are stacked up.  A lot of the time, I am thinking about my own disabled ancestors. 

This piece is the last piece I have with some detail shots on the next slide.  We have a body laying on a makeshift bed.  The pillows stacked up on the bed form the body.  This is porcelain.  They are taking lifecast molds of my own body.  I am thinking about the bed as a space of the body or the blending between the two.  There is a lot of material cracking happen. 

There is a detail shot of cracking porcelain sitting on a bedsheet.  I am thinking about how deep my connection to the bed is.  As I think about containers of the body, I think about what it means for the bed to be a disabled self-made container. 

I am starting to work with other disabled people to make these.  The one on the right is actually the infusion one we saw at the beginning.  Molly, sitting on a chair and holding up a casted arm.  There is another participant whose hands are being casted with me next to them.  I am starting to slowly incorporate a wider range of experiences throughout my sculptures. 

That is me. 

Bert Stabler:  Wonderful.  Thank you, Car, and thank you, everybody. 

For those who can stay - and if the CART person has to go, we can switch to Robo transcription - you can stay for a few more minutes.  If anybody would like to offer thoughts to the artists regarding what they have seen, I wanted to open up some space for that.  That could include showing images they didn't get to because of the tight deadline. 

Sonia Boue: Alx, would you like to show the slides you were not able? 

Alx Velozo:  I would love to share, but I don't want to change the trajectory.  If you want question and answer, we can do that. 

Bert Stabler:  I was privileged to talk to them yesterday and hear more from Alx.  I thought about a whole lot of new things. 

The transcriber can stay.  Thank you.  And thank you for offering that, Sonia.  One of these years, I will be able to politely tell people to wrap it up. 

I can mention themes that I saw, which could lead to people showing work.  The first theme that I thought was cool was "showing and hiding."  Showing in terms of pedagogy and showing disabled people in a space by changing how access, aids, objects, and tools there. 

The way that Xixi was showing packaging and other neutral design aspects can reflect back in a certain way when revealed, as well as the installation of work that applies to Alx and Xixi. 

In Ezra's work, I sensed a lot of discussion of secret and hidden knowledge, part of that Jewish mystical tradition as I understand it as a non-Jewish person. 

That came across in everyone's work, to a certain degree.  Both revealing and exposing.  Refusing to show and insisting on presence were both compelling aspects of the work. 

Would anybody want to throw in a comment about that?  I saw that as a facilitator. 

Alx Velozo:  I just wonder if this resonates with any of the other artists presenting.  One lovely thing was feeling echos between my practice and other people presenting.  Even things where I wouldn't have drawn light on those things in a short form.  The way so many of the artists here are engaging with sensation and disability were so resonant and so exciting to feel in kinship with.  I wanted to name that. 

Bert Stabler:  A good point.  A lot to do with time and bodies indexing time.  Non-archival organic matter.  Things transmuting other matters. 

An endurance fest for everyone.  It is a crip-positive event.  Don't mean to make you stick to this.  I am blown away by the work.  You see happy and appreciative comments in the chat as well. 

If anybody wants to make any final comments, particularly any artists who want to signal anything to another artist about what they appreciated.  But if we want to wrap up, that is totally fine. 

Xixi Edelsbrunner:  I wanted to muse on the ideas of hiding and showing.  I was thinking about the ways disabled people are so intensely erased.  It becomes such a spectacle as well.  Someone referred to me as a ghost once.  They were surprised I showed up to something.  [Laughing.]  The way you are seen with mobility equipment.  [Laughing.]  I don't know.  The sense of spectacle or gaze is intense. 

That is such a thing to think about with the work we are doing.  We are communicating with people, and it is hard to navigate what I want to communicate with other disabled people and what I want to communicate with everyone at large.  I don't want to get pigeonholed, but maybe not as nuanced in other people's minds.  For instance, that sculpture I had could be viewed as a walker.  But it is a sculpture, not a walker.  [Laughing.]  Those types of objects have a tendency to go right toward something blunt. 

Bert Stabler:  Disabled artists are so well-positioned for navigating the art space.  So many disabled people are not well-suited to be in those spaces.  I appreciated the stabbing aspect of one of your works. 

Alx's work represented grab bars and that adaptive infrastructure.  I didn't know that you could grab them, but that was part of the piece.  They were for dancing and being in a social space.  Talking to them made that clear.  And seeing Xixi's long piece is not a piece for leaning on or playing with.  It is a structure.  That is vital.  All art should be disabled in some way. 

Other thoughts?  Sonia?  I am bad at seeing raised hands. 

Sonia Boué:  Sorry, I was being awkwardly British and polite. 

I was thinking about materiality and the walker and the grabbing.  Ezra's coming back to the sacred and the elevating.  For me, the pompoms don't touch, but the sanctity have spending time with this material.  This object on a beanie hat or pompoms that are decorative or trivial objects.  The sanctity of it had this real interplay of touching and not touching, elevating the shitty and navigating the space and locating that.  It was truly wonderful. 

I presented more of a journey into becoming.  I felt like I could have talked more about the work in detail.  It was very immediate and very physical.  You have to engage with it.  It all seemed very subtle but very uncompromising and very strong. 

Bert Stabler:  As an art education faculty person, I really appreciate how much of the work is about teaching and physically showing what something is for.  That is a direct form of education, but it is an abstract plan and there is an idea of how you show people how to do things.  Both Sonia and Alx specifically - I wrote about Sonia recently and will write about Alx for the blog. 

What is happening to teaching is what is happening to the gallery.  Things people think they know how to do can become teachable.  People want to learn about other marginalized groups and that can be refused and hidden.  That is a cool and vital discussion to have in the world.  What we share and what we don't.  What is public and what is private.  That is another aspect that I appreciate in a lot of this work.  There is a lot to teach and unpack.  Many can hold down an hour and a half by yourself to hold down an audience. 

Other thoughts? 

Megan Bent:  I wanted to share and reflect back to Sonia that I appreciated the journey of coming into disability in that presentation.  I am making an assumption, but as an artist, that was a journey I had to take as well.  I appreciate you sharing that part of your practice with us today. 

Bert Stabler:  It is worth checking out the links shared since Sonia went to the trouble of making PDFs and group projects.  Alx also had great information that they might want to share as well.  A lot of disabled art curriculum.  As a self-diagnosed neurodivergent person, I am learning all kinds of things with other people and thinking back on my experiences. 

Alx Velozo:  I am doing the very disabled thing where I have to say thank you and goodbye.  It was an honor to be here.  Thank you to all those who came out. 

Bert Stabler:  Thanks, everybody.  A good time to call it.  The recording will be available.  There is the link to the links if you would like.  My blog link is in there.  I hope to interview those I have not yet.  With the funding I have, I will be in touch.  I will also share the transcript and the video. 

This was an honor.  I will be awash in thoughts for a while about it.  Thank you, people.  Have a good day. 

[End of symposium.] 

Please note: This transcription provides a meaning-for-meaning summary to facilitate communication access. It is the ultimate responsibility of the student to verify the accuracy of the information provided. Thank you.