Access Check: Mapping Accessibility 2.0
Thursday, July 18
from 4 to 7pm
ASL and CART services were provided
The building, The 8th Floor, and restrooms are wheelchair accessible
Photos by Inna Malinovaya, Portraits of Donald Lee, a bilateral amputee dancer, in motion.
[Image Description (left portrait): Donald Lee crouches in runners pose using his hands and left leg to prop himself up. He wears all white and stares directly into the camera.]
[Image Description (right portrait): Donald Lee stands on his left leg in a dancerly position: head bowed to the right with eyes closed while his arms curve inward in the air.]
In recognition of Disability Awareness Month, the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation hosted Access Check: Mapping Accessibility 2.0, bringing together artists, activists, and other cultural producers who have been integral to broadening and advancing the discourse around disability rights to offer their insights and resources to cultural workers and organizations interested in supporting accessible artistic practices. Critical of the idea that Disability Awareness Month is the designated time to address these questions, Access Check is structured as a forum to question how strategies for accessibility policy can be integrated into every day operations and thinking. Access Check has been developed in collaboration with interdisciplinary artist Jerron Herman, who facilitated a discussion following presentations by Pelanakeke Brown, Jason DaSilva, Kevin Gotkin, Donald Lee, and Catherine Morris.
Event Schedule
4:00 Pre-event reception
4:30 Introductions
4:45 Catherine Morris presentation
4:55 Jason DaSilva presentation
5:05 Collective breath and check-in
5:30 Pelanakeke Brown presentation
5:40 Kevin Gotkin presentation
5:50 Donald Lee presentation
6:00 Conversation
6:30/45 Q&A w/ audience
7:00 Post-event reception
Bios
Pelenakeke (Keke) Brown identifies as an immigrant and uninvited guest to Mannahatta, Lenapehoking. She hails from Aotearoa/New Zealand and is a Samoan, afakasi, disabled, queer artist. Her practice is multidisciplinary and spans drawing, writing and movement. She is a current recipient of Dance/NYC’s Disability Dance Artistry Award. She is a 2018 Create Change Fellow with the Laundromat Project and a NYFA Immigrant Artist Program alum. She has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center (VT), Denniston Hill (NY) and Ana Pekapeka Studio (NZ). She has exhibited her work in San Francisco, New York, London and Auckland, NZ. Her non-fiction creative work has been published in The James Franco Review, Hawai‘i Review, Apogee Journal and the upcoming Movement Research Performance Journal. She is a founding member of Touch Compass, New Zealand's first mixed-ability dance company.
She has attended the National Academy School of Fine Art, Studio Intensive Program, NY and received a BA in English literature and Pacific Studies, focusing on art and literature by indigenous people as well as post colonial theory, from Auckland University, NZ. Currently she is the Assistant Director of Culture Push, a NYC based non-profit arts organization.
Jason DaSilva has been a prolific filmmaker for the past 15 years. He has directed four short films (Olivia’s Puzzle, A Song For Daniel, Twins of Mankala, First Steps) and two feature length-documentary films (Lest We Forget and When I Walk). Olivia’s Puzzle premiered at the 2003 Sundance Festival. Three of his films have had national broadcasts on PBS, HBO, and CBC. DaSilva’s latest film, When I Walk, won a 2015 Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational Programming, was an Official Selection of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and won Best Canadian Feature at Hot Docs 2013. In 2014, Jason also won three awards: AAPD Mobility Magazine’s Person of the Year, the Paul E. Hearn Leadership Award, and the Christopher Award for Excellence in Film. Currently he is working on a new feature film When They Walk and on AXS Map, a website and accessibility database to find disability friendly places around the world.
Kevin Gotkin is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, & Communication at New York University and Co-Founder of Disability/Arts/NYC.
Jerron Herman (Moderator) is an interdisciplinary artist with a passion for combining disparate disciplines. He’s been featured with Heidi Latsky Dance at Lincoln Center, ADF, the Whitney Museum, and abroad in Athens. He’s been a principal member of HLD since 2011. Jerron now serves on the Board of Trustees at Dance/USA as Secretary on the Executive Committee. Herman has also shot for Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive, consulted for a Nike-sponsored project, and was profiled in Great Big Story. In 2018, he was a Snug Harbor PASS artist, a finalist for the inaugural Apothetae/Lark Play Development Lab Fellowship, and was nominated for a Fellowship in Dance from United States Artists. His latest solos include Phys. Ed. (premiere, Gibney Dance Center, Nov 2018), and Relative – a crip dance party (Performance Space, April 2019). He is also investigating body as source through his HEMI workshop that draws from his diagnosis “hemiplegia cerebral palsy.” Herman studied at Tisch School of the Arts and graduated from The King’s College. The New York Times has called him, "...the inexhaustible Mr. Herman."
Donald Lee is a bilateral amputee dancer with Heidi Latsky Dance (HLD), an integrated dance company featuring atypical bodies as sights/sites to address the ideas of beauty, physicality, and authenticity. His own creative practice explores the casualty of identities and the aesthetics of damage, loss, and wounds. He is particularly interested in the infinite (and often irreversible) process of repair in connection with social institution, cultural tradition, or personal history. He recently performed with Heidi Latsky Dance at Perry Farrell’s 2019 Kind Heaven Orchestra Tour in New York City. Lee is currently working with HLD to study mindful movement and to create a dance with individuals with spinal core injury. Their performance will premiere at the 2019 Disability Pride Parade. In addition. He is featured as an LGBTQIA+ artist/influencer in the World Pride 2019 | Stonewall 50 campaign. He received his BA in Art History from Clark University and is an artist based in Brooklyn.
Catherine Morris is the Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum where, since 2009, she has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions including Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving; We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985; Judith Scott-Bound and Unbound; and Materializing Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art (which won an AICA award for best Thematic Exhibition). She has worked on projects examining contemporary practices through historical precedents, including the museum-wide Sackler Center ten-year anniversary project, The Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum and Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection. She has worked on exhibitions and curatorial projects with Cecilia Vicuna, Ahmed Mater, Beverly Buchanan, Marilyn Minter, Zanele Muholi, Suzanne Lacy, Matthew Buckingham, Lorna Simpson, Eva Hesse, Kiki Smith, and Rachel Kneebone and produced historical exhibitions such as Twice Militant: Lorraine Hansberry’s Letter to The Ladder, Newspaper Fiction: The New York Journalism of Djuna Barnes, 1913-1919, Seductive Subversions: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968, and Healing the Wounds of War: The Brooklyn Sanity Fair of 1864. Morris was a curatorial organizer for the Brooklyn Museum presentation of Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985.
Previously an independent curator, Morris organized, among other projects, Decoys, Complexes and Triggers: Women and Land Art in the 1970s at Sculpture Center, Hans Hoffman, 1950 at the Rose Museum at Brandeis University; 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre and Engineering, 1966 for the List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts; two exhibitions, Gloria: Another Look at Feminist Art of the 1970s and Food at White Columns, New York and GAAG: The Guerrilla Art Action Group, at Printed Matter, New York.
