The art of access

On Sunday, August 13, from 1 to 4 PM, the Art Institute of Chicago hosted Cripping the Galleries, a series of live gallery activations through the lenses of crip culture, access, and belonging by Chicago dance artists in collaboration with Bodies of Work: A Network of Disability Art and Culture and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Featuring performances created by artists who self-identify as neurodivergent, sick, and disabled, the series of four performances continues over the next year, with the next iteration planned for this November at the MCA.

The inaugural program featured performances by Maggie Bridger, Anjal Chande, Mia Coulter, Sydney Erlikh, Shireen Hamza, Maypril Krukowski, and Kris Lenzo in nine of the museum’s galleries, some continuous, some presented periodically, which viewers could encounter at their pace.

Cripping the GalleriesFor more information on Bodies of Work, go to bow.ahs.uic.edu or facebook.com/BodiesofWork. More information on upcoming Cripping the Galleries performances at MCA and AIC will be available shortly.

A frequent visitor to the Art Institute, I initially sprinted along a tightly scheduled route to attend the performances as efficiently as possible, sparing hardly a glance for well-appointed Parisians promenading in perpetual drizzle along their cobblestone street, the crowd of laughing and grimacing Daumier busts, pastel and sculpted Degas ballerinas dangling in ungainly arabesques. I burst, minutes before 1 PM, into a large gallery lined with late 19th-century French artworks characterized by landscapes depicting the countryside and naturalistic portraits of humans on dark backgrounds, like Dutch still lifes blurred and animated.

But time and space widen as two dancers (Erlikh and Krukowski), clothed in blue tunics, patterned scarves, and earth-toned pants, lean against each other—one in a wheelchair, one standing, next to a bench. An audio description details their physical appearance, the artworks in the space, and their actions. The text, also printed on paper, is spoken in the third-person present tense, which the dancers recorded in their voices: “Constraint. They rest against each other beneath a painting of Jesus. His hands bound . . . Jesus mocked by the soldier. . . . Rolling away, they collapse in on oneself.”

A soundscape combining music and sounds of activities—grain falling, birdsong, cooking utensils—begins to infiltrate the space. The dancers move with tenderness, embodying gestures from the paintings as they glide through the room in a studied circuit, creating a narrative of mutual care, cooperation, work, and play. The audio description nearly always precedes the motion described. In a museum space, where wall texts and guided tours accompany artworks, there is a pleasurable logic to this repetition, which invites viewers to see the artworks and demands we notice the differences and the absences made visible in this performance—motion, animal life, fresh air, soft earth.

Between performances, Erlikh tells me the paintings show natural spaces, which are often inaccessible to people with disabilities. She also notes the artworks date from the Industrial Revolution, a time when people with disabilities were increasingly isolated from their families, rather than integrated into family farm labor. I linger and watch Right to Wander another time, see the sun rising behind the peasant girl, crescent-shaped blade in her hand forgotten as she pauses, lips parted in wonder, arrested by music we cannot hear in Jules Adolphe Breton’s 1884 painting The Song of the Lark.

In the Alsdorf Galleries, Indian, Southeast Asian, Himalayan, and Islamic figures of deities repose, some open to the air, some behind glass, spaced in intervals within a space that functions as a long, wide corridor connecting the building on Michigan to the building on Columbus. “In the white-walled Arts of Asia gallery, we feel strange,” write Hamza and Chande about their performance, Hide and Seek. “We grew up around murtis, or statues of the gods, covered in cloth and flowers, bathed in milk: familiar presences in homes and community spaces of worship. Hindu and Muslim, we both know their stories; both of our ancestors did too. Here in the museum, shoes must be worn. One must not sit or lie on the ground. One must not sing. Food, flowers, and spice may not be offered to bodies of flesh or stone. The murtis are naked; sometimes we cover them, so they are not seen.”

As I cross through a space populous with gods, I also feel strange. I do not even know their names—did not even know that the flame peeking from the head of the large 12th-century Buddha Shakyamuni sitting here is a flame and not Buddha’s ponytail, until the wall label informs me it is the fire of enlightenment. Hamza and Chande are by a large screen with several long pieces of fabric draped over it—Chande is standing with a semitransparent scarlet fabric, folding and unfolding it slowly in front of a stone Shiva from Tamil Nadu. Hamza is seated on the floor, sometimes covering, sometimes framing herself with a striped cloth, mirroring the snake hood of the sandstone Parshvanatha seated in meditation. Hours later, when I pass by again, they are sitting on the ground on opposite sides of a boar incarnation of Vishnu, singing prayers and accompanying each other on instruments. On the bench by the window, people are sitting quietly and lying down as they listen.

In the sunken court of the Arts of the Americas, Bridger and Coulter’s What I Know About Solid Comfort roams through galleries 166, 172, and 176 in a continuous loop for three hours. These galleries situate paintings and sculptures among elegant home furnishings—notably chaise lounges, each as large as a couch, designed for a single person to recline, feet up and out, taking up space and resting in plain sight.

Bridger and Coulter’s performance is anchored by an 1876 Marks adjustable folding chair, luxuriously upholstered in floral brocade, with somewhat ominous stirrup-like metal footrests. “I just fell in love with that chair,” says Bridger during a pause, noting it has sometimes been described as an “invalid chair,” perhaps for some person to receive visitors, a blanket pulled up over legs, legs and back and body and seat positioned by another person. Next to this chair, which is barred from use by a rope lining the wall, Bridger and Coulter take turns reading texts on comfort, pain, and the dependence and independence of illness and disability. As one reads, the other dances—and an ASL interpreter offers another mode of access through movement. Between readings, they proceed to the other galleries, including one with a cushion for resting on the floor.

In Arts of the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine World, a 2nd-century marble relief of a falling warrior is mounted on a wall, arms flung out from a muscular torso, legs cropped where the stone has cracked. In This One Moves, Lenzo, whose legs were amputated at age 19, mirrors this fall, arms outstretched, tilting down to the floor at a steep diagonal. Among athletes and gods sculpted in white stone, he sweeps through the space, a living example of these idealized bodies missing limbs, some even heads. He pins himself precariously against the wall; makes a tight turn around a standing figure, one hand sliding along its base; and glides, arms open, no hands on the wheels, in a swiveling walk that takes him snaking through the space. “Bodies evolve,” he says in his audio recording, leaning, spinning, balancing, never falling.

Cripping the Galleries originated as part of a two-year partnership between the MCA and Bodies of Work, explains MCA performance and programs manager Sandy Guttman, who was then a University of Illinois Chicago graduate student in disability studies working closely with Dr. Carrie Sandahl, director of the program on disability art, culture, and humanities and professor at UIC and co-director of Bodies of Work (now based at UIC, originally housed at the MCA). In addition to launching Access Praxis, an MCA program that gathered audience feedback about accessibility, Guttman and MCA manager of learning Daniel Atkinson began to discuss strengthening cooperation across the MCA, the AIC, and Bodies of Work with Sam Ramos and Kristen French, director and assistant director of gallery activation at the Art Institute.

“Cripping the Galleries came out of those collaborative conversations,” says Guttman. “The intention for these programs is to build connections with disabled artists and audiences and build the institutional knowledge or muscle around creating accessible programs informed by disabled artists. Each iteration invites attendees to provide feedback, which will be shared with both MCA and AIC, informing the next iteration of the project. It’s about connection, collaboration, and being both reflexive and responsive to the needs of audiences, artists, and the institutions who serve them.”

For its organizers, which include Bridger and Erlikh (both graduate students in disability studies at UIC), the day was triumphant. “Seeing the project come to life, across these three organizations I am deeply connected to is really gratifying, and, dare I say, dreamy,” says Guttman. “In all the years I’ve been coming to AIC and working there, I don’t recall feeling this much joy and community in the galleries before! It made me see and feel the work in entirely new ways.”

“I’m so proud of the staff and the performers for their enthusiasm and skill in making this program happen,” adds Ramos. “The dances were incredible and moving, and the energy in the room was uplifting and positive all day. I’m grateful that the museum provided the support and resources to push the museum forward in its hospitality and accessibility mission.”

“Even though I pass through these galleries almost every day at work, after seeing these performances, I know I won’t experience the spaces the same way again,” says French. “I’m so grateful for the presence of the artists not just on the day of the program but for all the ways their work will continue to inform what’s possible and what’s prioritized at the Art Institute.”

Reflecting on how Cripping the Galleries could have lasting ramifications on how these organizations operate, Sandahl says, “I loved the presence of the disability community in the Art Institute. We all had to negotiate an accessible route. To me, that was a big part of the performance, seeing folks helping each other out and supporting one another to move through the space. This is why I love Chicago: artists support one another. We’re such an activist town, and our activists are often artists. Our flavor of disability art and culture is very community-oriented and change-oriented.”