DISRUPT AND RESIST
/Disrupt And Resist : A Love Letter To The Disability Community On What Showing Up For Each Other Can Be
Curated by Alissa Maru and Jen White Johnson
September 9 - November 11, 2023, @ Mason Exhibitions Arlington
About the Exhibition
DISRUPT AND RESIST is an exhibition of 7 contemporary disabled designers and artists engaging in disability advocacy through creative resistance and anti-ableist disruption. This exhibition amplifies the ways disabled artists show up for themselves and each other. Shining a light on the joy of their own lived experience, DISRUPT AND RESIST amplifies the mission of exploring accessibility, disability justice, radical joy, belonging, and inclusivity. Disrupt and resist means to advocate for access-centered protest, dismantling the desire for a non-disabled body. To honor the unique beauty of each individual, celebrating the diversity of minds and bodies that enrich our world. To proudly identify as disabled and neurodivergent, using our art and activism as tools for empowerment and transformation.
This exhibition brings together a beautiful range and cohort of disabled orNeurodivergent creators who use their art practice to inform and advocate for disability justice. The artists disrupt the narrative of disability through video to photography to sculpture and sound design.
The exhibition is co-curated by Alissa Maru and Jen White-Johnson. Please see gallery staff for any additional accessibility accommodations. Large print format materials are available at the reception desk.
Knox at the BMA, 2018 by Jennifer White Johnson
Image Description: A silhouette of a 5-year-old Black autistic boy standing in an art gallery, surrounded by purple and blue hues radiating onto him via projections and LED light tubes.
Participating Artists
Image Description: A white man with neglected sandy blond hair and a red and grey beard. He has blue eyes that are trying to make contact with you. He is partially smiling with his mouth closed. He has dimples. His mother says he looks like Beau Bridges.
Andy Slater is a blind Chicago-based media artist, writer, performer, and
Disability advocate/loudmouth. Andy holds a Masters in Sound Arts and Industries from Northwestern University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a 2022 United States Artists fellow, 2022-2023 Leonardo Crip Tech Incubator fellow and a 2018 3Arts/Bodies of Work fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago.
He is a teaching artist with the Atlantic Center for the Arts’ Young SoundSeekers program, Midwest Society For Acoustic Ecology, and Creative Users’ Sensory Shift program. Andy’s current work focuses on advocacy for accessible art and technology, Alt-Text for sound and image, the phonology of the blind body, spatial audio for extended reality, and sound design for film, dance, and digital scent design. Andy is a member of the 3Arts Disability Culture Leadership Initiative New Art City accessibility board, and the founder of the Society of Visually Impaired Sound Artists.
Artist Website : https://www.thisisandyslater.net/
Artist Instagram: @thisisandyslater
Re/ Your Prescription Has Been Delayed. Sound installation - Audio Link Here
Echoalia, 2023, Sound installation, 1 hour/ every 15 min - Explore this sound installation by visiting our gallery.
Invisible Ink, 2022, Sound installation
Landing Site, 2020 Oil on canvas, 6 in x 4 in
Witnesses,2021 Oil on canvas, 6 in x 4 in
Who’s Day Is It?, 2019 Mixed media on wood, 4in x 2.5in
Finnegan Shannon (b. 1989, Berkeley, CA) is an artist experimenting with forms of access. They intervene in ableist structures with humor, earnestness, and rage. Some of their recent work includes Anti-Stairs Club Lounge, an ongoing project that gathers people together who share an aversion to stairs; Alt Text as Poetry, a collaboration with Bojana Coklyat that explores the expressive potential of image description; and Do You Want Us Here or Not, a series of benches and cushions designed for exhibition spaces. They have done projects with the Queens Museum, the High Line, MMK Frankfurt, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and Nook Gallery. Their work has been supported by a Wynn Newhouse Award, an Eyebeam fellowship, and grants from Art Matters Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Disability Visibility Project. They live and work in Brooklyn, NY.
Artist Website : https://shannonfinnegan.com/
Artist Instagrams: @finneganshann0n
Image Description: Me, a white person with buzzed hair, stands next to a bright blue bench. The bench has hand-written text that reads, "I wish this city was more hospitable to my body's needs. Rest here if you agree." I'm wearing a colorful outfit and a white face mask.
Do you want us here or not, 2020
It was hard to get here, 2020
Image Description: A black and white photo of a light-skin Black person with bold eyebrows, braids with an undercut, a septum piercing, and dangling earrings. They are wearing a black turtle-neck shirt, dark lip stick, and chipped nail polish.
Indira Allegra is the founder of Indira Allegra Studio - a performative craft design studio using weaving as a ritual, conceptual framework to craft living structures off the loom and in the world. This approach to design uses poetry as a method to 'read' environments for clues 'hidden between the lines' or clues hiding between what is clearly articulated by a site and what is not. Of importance are desires for transformation which haunt sites and beings experiencing them. Thinking as a poet, threads of connection between disparate experiences can be discovered. Moving as a weaver, the fates of seemingly disconnected stories, objects and beings become interlaced and transmuted into a greater whole. Poetry and weaving are universal techniques for bringing different materials into conversation for a precise kind of call and response so that new structures of knowledge might be expressed. A living structure can be performed as a song, a memorial, a text, or the movement of human and non-human behavior across a rolling planet. Rather than focus on "human centered" design, the Studio situates human concerns within a broader network of more-than-human desires and ecological temporalities.
Allegra's work has been featured in ARTFORUM, The Art Newspaper, Artnet, Art Journal, BOMB Magazine, SF Chronicle and KQED and in exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design, the Arts Incubator in Chicago, Center for Craft Creativity and Design, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Museum of the African Diaspora among others.
Artist Website: https://www.indiraallegra.com/
Artist Instagram: @indiraallegrastudio
Image Description: Polaroid of the artist, a white man with blue eyes and blonde hair, from the shoulders up. Staring deep into the camera, you notice a fresh cut above his left eyebrow on his forehead with stitches.
Robert Andy Coombs grew up in Michigan's majestic Upper Peninsula where he spent his childhood roaming the great outdoors. He started photographing his walkabouts in middle school and moved on to portraiture in high school. Coombs received a scholarship to Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids Michigan. During his third year in undergrad, Coombs sustained a spinal cord injury due to a gymnastics training accident. After a year of recovery, he returned to KCAD and received his BFA in photography in 2013. Coombs' photography explores the intersections of disability and sexuality. Themes of relationships, caregiving, fetish, and sex are depicted and explored throughout. Coombs graduated from the Yale School of Art with his MFA amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and is currently residing in sunny Miami Florida.
Artist Website: https://www.robertandycoombs.com/
Artist Instagram: @robertandycoombs_
Image Description: A white performer in a white mesh shirt dances with a lavender cane across a floor covered with cornstarch. A large black speaker looms in the corner of the room and the cornstarch holds the trace of the dancer’s movement and floor contact with their cane and feet.
Alx Velozo is a trans and disabled sculptor, educator, and performance artist raised in North Florida: occupied Timucua land, currently residing in Baltimore, Maryland: occupied Pascataway land. Their 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, movement and object-based performances, and facilitation. They most recently received their M.F.A. in Sculpture and Extended media from Virginia Commonwealth University, and previously received a B.F.A. from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Velozo has exhibited, taught, and facilitated in Baltimore, New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Richmond, Miami, Los Angeles, and Chilchota, MX, Montreal, QC.
Artist Website: https://alxvelozo.com/
Artist Instagram: @alx.velozo
Speculative Grab Bar #3, 2023
This graphite rubbed sculpture is composed of 3 weaving tubes mounted on a white wall. The tubes are bent in various directions with a marbleized sky blue rubber hardware at each point they meet the wall. There are a total of 6 points of contact fixed by this sky rubber hardware.
Pink Rbbr Cane, 2022
A pink rubber cane with a gray stopper drapes over a bright blue acrylic stand. The simple acrylic stand is made up of an upside down u shape for the rubber cane’s handle to rest on, a vertical acrylic rod and a rectangular platform, all of which are a bright transparent blue.
Alx Velozo, Breath Play, 2021
Close up video of a white cane-using performer costumed in transparent latex t-shirt and shorts moving through a room filled with transparent balloons. The balloons pop and squeak against the performer’s movement.
Image Description: A close-up photo of a kind looking white woman with freckles, green eyes, brown and pink short hair, a wide nose, and a close-mouth smile with dimples.
Gwynneth VanLaven is an artist, activist and facilitator whose practice includes photography, installation, writing, performance, and social engagement. Multi-modality and interdiscipinarity have been a key in Gwynneth’s lifelong studies and approach to community, with an independent undergraduate degree “Multimodal Language,” (BA, Knox College) , Critical Art Practice in the School of Art (MFA, George Mason University), and as a current therapist-in-training (MSW candidate, University of Michigan). The medium of VanLaven’s art practice can be hard to define, as it is often socially engaged, improvisational even within doldrums of the everyday, and it pokes at life, art, and other institutions. Thus one of her favorite media of art engagement is “playful agitation.” Gwynneth VanLaven (she/they) holds co-facilitates for DanceAbility, and a certified leader for Community Conversations and InterPlay.
Artist Website: https://www.vanlaven.art/
Image Description: Afro-Latina Mother and Son standing next to each other. Mom is wearing her favorite black leather jacket. She has a top-knot and streaks of blond through her dark hair. She is wearing blue jeans with the knees frayed. She is also wearing her favorite black high top sneakers. She is smiling at her son. Her son is wearing a red puffer vest with a rainbow long sleeve shirt. He has an afro and is wearing blue headphones, he also wearing blue jeans and red sneakers.
Jen White Johnson is a disabled and Neurodivergent Afro-Latina art activist and design educator whose visual work aims to uplift disability justice narratives in design. As an artist-educator with Graves disease and ADHD, Jen uses photography, zines, and collage art to explore the intersection of content and caregiving, emphasizing redesigning ableist visual culture. Jen has presented her disability justice activist work and collaborated with a number of brands and art spaces across print and digital such as Target, Coachella and Adobe Design. Her photo and design work has been featured in The Washington Post, AfroPunk, Art in America, The New York Times, and Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation and is permanently archived in libraries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and most recently acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. In 2020 she was an honoree on the Diversability’s D-30 Disability Impact List and In 2021 she was listed as 20 Latino Artists to watch on Today.com Jen has an MFA in Graphic Design from The Maryland Institute College of Art, she currently lives in Baltimore with her husband Kevin and 10-year-old son Knox.
Artist Website: https://jenwhitejohnson.com/
Artist Instagram: @jtknoxroxs
INSTALLATION VIEWS
OUTDOOR DIGITAL MEDIA SCREEN
Gwynneth VanLaven, Bare Witness
A camera is said to capture, or freeze an action in time and space. So too does a traumatic event. Unable to stop the car hurtling toward my place on the sidewalk, I feel captured by memory and frozen. I use photography to unfreeze, in order to create slower time for contemplation. For some time since the event of a car careening into and crushing my body, I have been playing in the realm of the unexpected. The traffic barrels develop trauma stories told in exhaust grime and battle scars, commingling with mine. The stills in Bare Witness hold danger up for contemplation for the slow act of falling in love with uncertainty. And yet the barrel stands still at attention, holding vigil, bare to the world, to both signal and witness for us all, the presence of vehicular danger.
The media screen is outside the gallery, to right coming out of the front door, past the Latitude Apartment entrance and in the breezeway
Event Recordings
Virtual Artist Talk, September 16, 2023
Arlington Art Walk, Thursday, Oct. 5, 2023
The "Arlington Art Walk" is a self-guided art experience that connects local galleries, artist studios and cultural events.
Rebirth Garments Workshop, Saturday, October 21, 2023
Mason Exhibitions and Sky Cubacub explored the idea of Radical Visibility, a Disabled Queer dress reform movement based on highlighting the parts of us that society typically shuns.
‘In the Hour of War’ Anthology Reading, Wednesday, November 8, 2023
The Alan Cheuse International Writers Center, Plamen Press, and Mason Exhibitions will convene four poets, to read and discuss their work on the Arlington campus’s Mason Exhibitions art gallery. Edited by poets Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky, this anthology is a critical reminder of the struggles Ukrainians are facing in light of war, and serves as a beacon of hope, determination, and reckoning for Ukrainians across the globe in their continual fight for democracy.
Additional programming supporting the exhibition:
All events will take place at Mason Exhibitions Arlington and are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.
The exhibition and events are free and open to members of the media and the public.
Opening Reception and Pop-Up Showcase of Arlington Weaves
Saturday, September 9, 5–8 p.m.
Join Mason Exhibitions for the opening reception of Disrupt and Resist: A love letter to the disability community on what showing up for each other can be. To celebrate the opening, Arlington Weaves is a program supporting individuals with disabilities. Participants within the program learn to weave and produce handcrafted woven art, including color tote bags, pencil cases and so much more.
Disrupt and Resist Artist Talk
Saturday, September 16, 1-3p.m
Dive into the community of disabled artists and dialogue with the artists of the exhibition.
ASL Storytime with Arlington County Library
Thursday, September 21, 2p.m
Visit us for story time for all ages. Arlington County Library will lead a story time, with books that shine light on disabled stories. An American Sign Language Interpreter will be onsite.
Sofar Sounds Music Night
Friday, September 29, 8 - 10 p.m.
The secret’s out! You’ll see two or three short sets from incredible performers from all musical genres, and sometimes even spoken word, comedy, or dance.
Arlington Collective Art Walk
Thursday, October 5, 3 - 7p.m
Join us for the "Arlington Art Walk" and visit multiple exhibits in one day.
Rebirth Garments Workshop
Saturday, October 21, 12 - 2p.m
ASL Storytime with Arlington County Library
Thursday, October 19, 4p.m
Weaving Demonstration with Arlington Weaves
Saturday, November 4, 12 - 2p.m
Disability Film Festival
Saturday, November 4, 2 - 4p.m
Join Mason Exhibitions Arlington and ReelAbilities Film Festival: Northern Virginia in a film screening of short films and 1 feature film documenting the various lives of those that identify as disabled.
Zine Workshop with Art Enables and Jennifer White-Johnson
Saturday, November 11, 11 a.m.–3 p.m.
Join us for a Zine workshop in collaboration with Art Enables and Disability Art Activist and Designer, Jennifer White-Johnson. In this transformative session, participants will be encouraged to create their own zines and add them to a pop-up zine installation at Art Enables.
Location: Art Enables: 2204 Rhode Island Ave NE, Washington, DC 20018
RSVP is required to receive the zoom link Here