Crip’d Art Ecologies: Fermenting Crip’d Desire, Grief, Celebration, and Rage
Saturday, September 11, 4-6pm ET / 1-3pm PST

moira williams, Ezra Benus, and CUE Art Foundation are excited to invite you to a Zoom gathering of disability artistry and conversation in community with Stephanie Alvarado, Christopher Unpezverde Núñez, and Bl3ssing Oshun Ra. Each artist offers deeply meditative and fermentative feelings and thoughts that are grounded in interdependence and expressed through their work. Their creativity articulates and approaches feelings as valued knowledge, which are often overlooked by mainstream notions of value when it comes to disability. Crip’d Art Ecologies: Fermenting Crip’d Desire, Grief, Celebration, and Rage recognizes that communal catharsis and appreciation of complexity in disability experiences are not often validated in a larger context, and are excluded from the arts due to systemic ableism. Together, we will acknowledge our feelings as valued knowledge and validate one another in community.

Working from a place of emotional synergy is resistance, and is deeply rooted in cultural shifts led by Disability and Social Justice movements. It is also integral to shifting the arts, culture, and socio-politics of value. Stephanie Alvarado, Christopher Unpezverde Núñez, and I3lessing Oshun Ra specifically engage in a Crip’d artistry, fermented in desire, grief, celebratory resistance, and rage as ways of being and feeling, and as manifestations of Disability Justice. These expressions reflect political disparities and systemic oppressions revealed by the pandemic, which disabled artists across disabilities and race have long witnessed and experienced. Each artist will share a performance, then join each other in conversation to address the importance of validating relationships of and between emotionality embedded works by co-witnessing and sharing.

Crip’d Art Ecologies: Fermenting Crip’d Desire, Grief, Celebration, and Rage asks the arts community: What are our communal, interpersonal, and individual reckonings with emotionality as disabled creatives in relation to cultural and social devaluations of our complexity? How can we shift current cultural production to address and support disabled artists in generative ways when there is little understanding of and support for the processes, thoughts, creativity, and feelings our disability communities express? How do the arts thrive together beyond the pandemic, without excluding our disabled communities? How can movements in the arts to dismantle regimes of power truly succeed when disability arts are underrepresented and undervalued?

Crip’d Art Ecologies: Fermenting Crip’d Desire, Grief, Celebration, and Rage was selected as a runner-up from CUE’s 2021 Open Call for Public Programs and will be presented as a single event based upon the original programming series proposal.

Due to concerns over recent spikes in COV-ID 19 this event will now be a fully on-line event. Crip’d Art Ecologies: Fermenting Crip’d Desire, Grief, Celebration, and Rage will be livestreamed for an audience via Zoom.

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Ezra Benus is a white, Ashkenazi, Jewish, queer disabled artist and curator from Brooklyn and the Bronx, and completed degrees in Jewish Studies and Studio Art at CUNY Hunter College. Ezra’s practice engages with the assumptions around illness, time, pain, and relationships/rituals of care. He has presented and curated at The 8th Floor, Flux Factory, NYU Gallatin Galleries, Dedalus Foundation, Gibney Dance, and The Laurie M. Tisch Gallery. He has lectured/consulted at Red Bull Arts Detroit, Hunter College Galleries, Eyebeam, SUNY Purchase, CUE Art Foundation, York College, Princeton University, with residencies at Wave Hill, and is currently in the SHIFT Residency at EFA. Benus was the Erich Fromm Fellow at Paideia Institute in Stockholm, and the first Access and Adult Learning Fellow at Brooklyn Museum. Ezra is one part of the duo Brothers Sick with his brother Noah. Their works have been featured at Visual AIDS' April Web Gallery, Shape Arts’ The Future Is Loading… , and The Shed.

moira williams is a disabled indigenous artist, disability culture activist, and dreamer weaving together cross-disability justice, gatherings, and arts with eco-somatics and queer ecologies. moira believes in “access intimacy”* as an attitude beyond the Americans with Disabilities Act. Their often co-creative work leads with disability and ecology, approaching culture as something we actively shape together. moira’s ongoing work with water focuses on “access intimacy”* and water intimacy as ways forward to accessible NYC waterfronts, which led to extended comment deadlines for NYC’s cross-disability community, an accessible public bathroom, plus an online and in-person Disability Cabaret on an accessible boat. They recently received Santa Fe Arts Institute REVOLUTION, Blue Mountain Center, Disability + DANCE NYC Social Justice Fellowships, and a Disability Futures Fund grant. moira’s recent work has been at Works on Water Triennial, Landscape Research UK, and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum Denmark, and has appeared in A Field Guide to iLANDING and Jacket2.

*“Access intimacy” is “that hard to describe feeling when someone else ‘gets’ your access needs.” 
-Mia Mingus

Stephanie Alvarado is a queer multidisciplinary artist, poet, researcher, and archivist whose work is rooted in community organizing practices, social justice, and local memory as a form of collective healing.  At the core of Alvarado’s practice is a dedication to how language, both visual and linguistic, can become a tool for communities to reclaim agency over their histories and narratives as bodily autonomy and liberation. Born and raised in the Bronx, NY by way of Guayaquil, Ecuador, she has roots as a community organizer working in reproductive justice movements and as an academic teaching and working in libraries and archives. Stephanie is currently exhibiting her work An Ode to The Bronx in Palo Santo as part of the “REGENERATION” show at The White Plains Library Museum Gallery alongside artists from The Studio Collective. Stephanie has held artist residencies and fellowships at Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Center, The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, Witness for Peace, and The Laundromat Project. She’s had poetry readings at Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden, Pregones Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, and Kelly Street Garden. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for The Literary Freedom Project. Stephanie received her BA from NYU in Psychology, Latino Studies, and Public Policy and her MA in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University

Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez (b. Costa Rica, Garífuna descendant) is a Visually Impaired Choreographer, Educator, Activist, Curator, and Accessibility Consultant based in New York City. His performances have been presented at The Brooklyn Museum for The Immigrant Artist Biennale, The Kitchen, Movement Research at The Judson Church, The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Battery Dance Festival, Performance Mix Festival, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and Dixon Place, among others. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, The Dance Enthusiast, and Leslie-Lohman Museum’s bi-annual journal The Archive. He has held residencies at New Dance Alliance (LiftOff, 2018), Battery Dance Studios (Space Grant, 2017-2019), The Kitchen (DAP, 2019) and is currently an Artist In Residence at Center for Performance Research and Movement Research Mertz Gilmore Foundation. His most recent collaborations include “Dressing Up for Civil Rights” by William Pope L, presented at MoMA, and "La Procession" by Nacera Belaza presented at Danspace Project. Núñez was invited to share his story as a queer, disabled, and formally undocumented artist during Immigrant Heritage Week 2020 by the NYC Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs. Núñez received his green card in 2018 and continues to be an advocate for the rights of disabled and queer undocumented immigrants. He holds a BFA in Science in Performing Arts from the National University of Costa Rica.

Bl3ssing Oshun Ra is a Black disabled and transfeminine artist, educator, and organizer born and raised in NYC. A lifelong environmentalist, Bl3ssing is the founder of an autonomous community initiative called the "Green Afrofuturist Project," where they facilitate immersive storytelling experiences that combine sci-fi and a Blues aesthetic, with a focus on ecology, in order to address environmental racism and underrepresentation of marginalized voices in scientific discourse.