IMAGE - Fist-bumping during an interview at StoryCorps San Francisco with Ingrid Tischer (left), Director of Development, DREDF and Alice Wong (right), Head Honcho, Disability Visibility Project, 2014. Image courtesey Alice Wong, DVP.
In collaboration with artist/curator Cara Levine, artist Jennifer Justice, Alice Wong (Disability Visibility Project), StoryCorps, and Creative Growth Arts Center, Indigo Mind presents a panel discussion about the critical need to document and share artists' narratives in their own words, across a spectrum of abilities. Please join us in a lively discussion about the nature of creativity, disability, and the necessity for a voice in the public. Moderated by Indigo Mind co-curator Arianne Gelardin.
Creative Growth Art Center serves adult artists with developmental, mental and physical disabilities, providing a professional studio environment for artistic development, gallery exhibition and representation and a social atmosphere among peers. Represented by arts educator Madelyn Covey.
The Disability Visibility Project was pioneered by disability advocate Alice Wong and supported by the community, the Disability Visibility Project aims to collect the diverse voices of people in the disability community and preserve their history for all, especially underrepresented groups such as people of color and LGBTQIA people with disabilities. From July 2014 to December 2015, people with disabilities are encouraged to go to StoryCorps at the San Francisco Public Library's main branch to record their story in celebration of the upcoming 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Having these stories archived and available to the public will preserve disability history, making them accessible to all.
Jennifer Justice is an artist living in Oakland. She teaches at University of California, Berkeley and NIAD Art Center, Richmond. Justice pairs historical archival research with found footage and digital assistive technology (such as captioning and audio description) to excavate the under- represented culture of disabled people.
As a Bay Area-based artist, Cara Levine explores the intersections of the physical, metaphysical, traumatic and illusionary through video, photography and sculpture. She has worked for years through ideas around chronic pain and the body--though it has been in the last year--while coming into her adult body as a chronic migraineur, that her understanding of pain, perceptual experience and creativity has formally merged.
Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 50,000 interviews with over 100,000 participants. Each conversation is recorded on a CD to share, and is preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind, and millions listen to our weekly broadcasts on NPR’s Morning Edition and on the StoryCorps listening pages. We are pleased to welcome Geraldine Ah-Sue, Yosmay del Mazo, and Như Tiên Lữ to this panel.