Honoring the many interconnected relationships that facilitate making and being, to hold a we features newly commissioned and recent work by fourteen emerging and early-career disabled artists and collectives from the BRIClab residency program. Across drawing, text, sculpture, video, photography, installation, and performance, the artists continually turn to memory, intimacy, grief, and the archive as both a source of inspiration and a means of connection.
The exhibition, co-organized with the artists, borrows its title from (2013) by Constantina Zavitsanos and Park McArthur, conjuring ongoing legacies of collaboration, care, and interdependence within disability communities. The titular we counters the everyday, ever-present risk and reality of isolation, neglect, and erasure, and reflects the plurality of the artistic, curatorial, and community processes that made the exhibition (and its related programming) possible.
to hold a we is rooted in the ten principles of Disability Justice, penned by Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, Stacey Milbern, and fellow Sins Invalid activists. Through these principles – including intersectionality, wholeness, cross-movement organizing, cross-disability solidarity, and collective liberation – the exhibition poses kinship, abundance, tenderness, and trust as alternatives to structural inaccessibility, exploitation, and violences.
to hold a we is organized by Maria McCarthy, Curatorial Associate and danilo machado, Co-Curator with A. Sef, Alex Dolores Salerno, Brothers Sick (Ezra and Noah Benus), Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective, Cinthya Santos Briones, Dominic Bradley, Finnegan Shannon, Isabella Vargas, Linda Ryan, OlaRonke Akinmowo, Pelenakeke Brown, Steven Anthony Johnson II, and Yasi Ghanbari.
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