Taking Care Webinar: A community-led discussion on cultural accessibility in the arts
What new and enriching ways do we experience and facilitate arts and culture when we are committed to cultural accessibility? To start, how can cultural organizations and institutions work beyond accommodation under a compliance model for accessibility and towards care?
As artists, curators, and cultural organizations – are we doing enough to consider the impacts of existing material colonial and capitalist conditions on culture and class that affect mental and physical disabilities and accessibility needs within the arts? Furthermore, in what ways are the terminologies organizations have come to adapt like “Disability Justice”, are becoming far-removed from their histories and the initial tenets of action they arose from?
These topics and more will feature in this panel. “Taking Care” will be facilitated by artist and Disability Justice organizer, Carmen Papalia and will feature, center, and celebrate the experiences and perspectives of fellow artists, creatives, and organizers: Siobhan Barker, Raven John, Q Lawrence, and Kay Slater.
In this panel and open discussion, we will address what it is about the arts in cultural organizations that is inherently institutional and inaccessible but also how art and creativity itself is where we extend care towards each other in profound ways.
Watch recorded Webinar
Date: Wednesday, October 12, 2022
Time: 7:00-8:30pm
Tickets: Free
Platform: Zoom (Information about how to connect will be sent to participants prior to the event through Eventbrite)
ASL Interpretation and live auto-captioned transcript will be available. The event will be recorded and a proofread transcript will be sent out after.
Schedule:
7pm: Panel Start & Intros
7:10pm: Panel discussion
7:50pm: Break
7:55-8:30pm: Q&A with attendees
8:30pm: Event Ends
Panelists
Siobhan Barker is a published, nationally recognized bilingual equity and accessibility consultant also sought as a performer, spokesperson, and community organiser. Sio advocates recognizing the impact of intersectionalities in moving toward equity, decolonizing practices, and collective liberation. As a non-binary person of mixed ancestry living with disability, they recognize and value the intersection of identities that inform disability & healing justice, artistic practice, change-making, and honouring ancestral teachings.
Raven is centred in the image with a white background. They are holding a white crowned puppet head on a silver pole from which a ribcage is suspended. Raven is an Indigenous, Fat, gorgeous human with brown skin and a confident, strong presence. They stare into the camera, head tilted back, their face in shadow from the snout of a mask and headpiece that sits at their forehead and flows back into a black fur mane atop their shoulders.
Raven John, artist, involuntary comedian and two-spirit activist, is of Coast Salish and Stolo Nation decent. This Two-spirit Trickster is a BFA graduate from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, with a major in visual art and minor in social practice and community engagement, as well as a graduate of the North West Coast Jewelry Arts program at the Native Education College. Raven is a visual artist, cultural consultant, mediator, storyteller, photographer and sculptor. A jack-of-all-trades (and master of a few), their practice covers a wide array of mediums from provocation and humor, puppet making, ceramics, dressmaking, interactive electronics and indigenous technologies. Should you wish to participate in direct action regarding Truth and Reconciliation and/or the ongoing colonization/genocide of the indigenous peoples of Canada, feel free to visit their following website to directly wire them money for coffee, comic books and/or art supplies.
Q stands to the right of centre in a wooded background with cedar trees. A few deciduous branches in early bloom are in the foreground as if hugging Q. It is a White human, with a small build and a light tuff of hair peeking out from under its black beanie hat. It wears large round sunglasses atop a smiling face, with an oversized red knitted sweater which pops in the green tree background over which an olive textured vest rest. The vest has a few scattered buttons.
Q Lawrence is a disability justice educator, accessibility & culture consultant, and grassroots death doula on the land of the Pilalt and Ts’elxwéyeqw tribes of the Stó꞉lō Nation.
It has worked as an educator and consultant with organizations such as Verses Festival of Words and Vancouver Poetry House, Women Against Violence Against Women, and Pivot Legal Society. It has also spoken at conferences such as the Edmonton Men’s Health Collective and Converge Con, and written for publications such as Briarpatch, ANMLY, and Pride Magazine on queer disabled culture and artist-activist movements.
With an understanding of queercrip culture and community grown from its love of mycology and especially mycelium, Q carries questions about connection amidst grief and what it means to build strong communities without carceral systems.
Person wearing a yellow raincoat stands in front of a white gallery wall on which 3 works of art are displayed.
Kay at the Oppenheimer Park group show hosted by Gallery Gachet in 2019.
Photo credit: Tom Quirk, 2019
Kay Slater is a multidisciplinary artist. Kay's artistic practice explores value as it relates to process and expectations. They enjoy creating and maintaining spaces where people can explore, learn, experience, fail, feel, and create!
Kay is queer, white, and hard of hearing. In meatspace, they create on Coast Salish territory in the traditional and ancestral lands of the Hul’q’umi’num’ and Skwxwú7mesh speaking people in so-called Vancouver. In cyberspace, they demand the use of They/Them pronouns, but will not correct you for fluid pronoun use in the real. Kay subscribes to the philosophy of the New Sincerity which strives to “be more awesome”.
Moderator
Carmen stands close to the camera to the left of a rocky beach.
The background is blurred but a blue daytime sky with wispy clouds can be seen over a choppy ocean. Carmen is an artist with olive coloured skin and black beard and eyebrows. He wears a brown, rimmed hat that looks soft and comfortable, as well as a beige jacket that is the same colour as the rocks in the background. He looks into the camera with a neutral expression.
Carmen Papalia is a nonvisual artist with chronic and episodic pain. In 2021 he co-founded the Open Access Foundation for Arts & Culture (OAFAC), a pandemic-era cultural organization that aims to set a new cultural standard for accessibility by nurturing creative and justice-oriented accessibility practices.
Since 2009 Papalia has used organizing strategies and improvisation to address his access to public space, art institutions and visual culture. His work, which takes forms ranging from collaborative performance to public intervention, is an effort to establish welcoming spaces where disabled, sick and chronically ill people can build capacity for care that they lack on account of governmental failure and medical ableism.
Papalia is an inaugural fellow of the Crip Tech Incubator via Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. In 2020 he was one of 25 artists who received the Sobey Art Award; in 2019 he was a Sobey long list recipient in the West Coast / Yukon region. His work has been exhibited internationally and at local venues such as the Contemporary Art Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery and Gallery Gachet.