“Wow, y’all look so good in your masks,” gushed co-curator danilo machado at the September 18 opening of to hold a we, an exhibition of recent and newly commissioned work by 14 early-career artists with disabilities at BRIC in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Machado added, wistfully: “Another world is possible.”
A fungus-like work blooms from a wall near the exhibition entrance, suggesting that we may be entering that other world. Mushrooms have been a hot topic of late, from Anna Tsing’s exploration of their world-making potential to their capacity as a sustainable building material. Here, Alex Dolores Salerno’s “Effleurage” (2024) indicates the welcome incursion of a different realm of thinking, feeling, and being. Salerno hand-sanded each burl — a material that grows upon hurt trees — as if tending the wound, caring for the sick. I wanted to run my fingers over its bulbous surface, this soft thing from a gentler world.
To hold a we centers care, collaboration, and interdependence within disability communities. Its title is drawn from Constantina Zavitsanos and Park McArthur’s “SCORE FOR LIFT AND TRANSFER” (2013), which choreographs non-transactional caretaking. It is rooted in Sins Invalid activists’ 10 Principles of Disability Justice, which includes intersectionality, the leadership of those most impacted, and collective access.
That’s two textual references already. Words, indeed, balloon to overwhelming proportions in this exhibition, whether as a form of pedagogy or a method of disrupting dominant modes of perceiving. In one panel of Pelenakeke Brown’s digital drawing “did you make it to the studio today?” (2024), for instance, text snakes around the page like ruminations. “Did you make it to the studio today? no, yes! no, no ….” The words become bigger and smaller, change color, wind upside down, crash into each other. If you, like me, define “artist” simply as “someone who makes art,” then this is the refrain that cuts to the core of our self-definition: Did you make something today? It must be doubly devastating when a world not built for you complicates your capacity to do so.
But text, in this exhibition, can also be incredibly challenging. For one, there’s a lot of it: A stack of books is set at the opening of the show. Another panel of Brown’s work is essentially a neural network of disability theory and other miscellany: Lines snake between phrases like “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time,” “Alt text as poetry,” and “Rodney moves to the US and you wonder if you can too,” among dozens of others. After that extended hand of a work from Salerno to open the show, the exhibition seems to abruptly turn its back on you. Their “Fortress Gate (Gemütlichkeit)” (2024), a person-sized wooden headboard hinged to the wall, literally faces away from you as you turn from the introductory wall text. It’s not much more divulging from the front: Scraps of paper, some bearing text, are pinned to its cork surface in various orientations. A sheet of printer paper holds a QR code to an open-access version of the anthology Austistic Community and the Neurodivergent Movement: Stories from the Frontline (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019). The accompanying wall text might more properly be called a manifesto. This exhibition, I thought, asks a lot of its viewers.
But that’s not quite true. If this show asks a lot, it’s only from a certain kind of viewer: one unfamiliar with the experience or literature of disability. Is that really asking more of a viewer than the art world writ large, which demands fluency in millennia of Euro-American art history? An ask in service of mutual understanding, inclusion, equity, and justice is a worthwhile one.
A commitment to any form of accessibility doesn’t just entail getting up to speed on the etiquette and theory of a world of experience that you don’t necessarily identify with. It also means examining your unconscious biases, and how those may have informed the way you engage the world. While writing this review, I thought about how my personal tastes are inevitably informed by my being able-bodied; my particular, extensive, and elite schooling; my upbringing in a metropolitan center; my great desire to be respected within the art world.
I noticed that the works I favored in this show were those that I felt weren’t “doing too much.” When it comes to the work of the Brothers Sick, for instance, I favored those with less text, such as their “Ritual Objects 1” (2024), in which an open pill bottle is inset into a domestic scene that includes two burning Shabbat candlesticks and a black box of tefillin. I loved the works of Steven Anthony Johnson II for their spare depictions of queer and trans elders. “Maya Marie” (2024), for example, depicts the eponymous figure alternatively in motion, daubing something onto the floor, and in rest, with a hand set gently on a thigh. I preferred Salerno’s movingly elegant sculpture of red-painted COVID-19 tests set in a Jenga-like configuration on a mirrored pedestal to their pinboard of texts.
That’s how I feel, at least, at this point in time. Separating my personal taste from that of the collective that formed me is an ongoing process, and I can’t claim for certain that I’ve succeeded here. Could I be the unconscious mouthpiece of the same dominant culture that has historically and presently suppressed the voices of those with disabilities? History tells me, unfortunately, that it’s very possible. See, for instance, contemporaneous reviews of the 1993 Whitney Biennial. A new aesthetics was on the rise then, and those critics missed it. It might be now. If a commitment to accessibility requires all of us to either change or become relics, then so be it.
This exhibition is a showcase of artists and collectives from the BRIClab residency program and should be judged as such, rather than a cohesive exhibition that includes works based upon a tight curatorial throughline. But grouping artists under the banner of disability offers a necessary — and illuminating — corrective to a landscape in which institutions attempt to preempt criticism by tokenizing one or two artists to round out exhibition programs that are too able-bodied (and male, and White, and, and, and). Still, we can’t let spaces like BRIC shoulder the burden of representing disability. I want to see these artists dispersed into the art world writ large, in shows that aren’t necessarily about disability.
From its artist selection and curation to its exhibition space and audience, the cloistered haven of to hold a we makes you believe wholeheartedly in the other world that Machado described. The opening welcomed visitors in wheelchairs, someone with a neon orange cane tipped with a hot-pink head, an adorable service dog. On the introductory wall text os a QR code to access audio descriptions of works and instructions for how to attain large-print, plain-text labels. Throughout the show, works seem to be hung a little lower than I’m used to, which is something we ought to do more. It wouldn’t be hard to introduce a new normal — there was a time not so long ago, for instance, when it felt unthinkable to walk through this city and encounter such a plurality of masks.
But this exhibition also reminds us that commitment to accessibility is a fragile thing that requires us all to buy in. On opening night, Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草 debuted the latest iteration of their performance Ciba Punch (2023–ongoing). At one point, two participants, eyes closed, began to intone in something between keening, singing, and sighing. We started as spectators, but soon it seemed as though a low hum was thrumming through the audience as well, an emergent organism breathing itself into life. It was beautiful to be held aloft by some collective energy for one pure, suspended moment. But then someone in the audience started talking and their voice echoed through the cavernous space, and broke that tenuous spell.
Afterward, as we spilled out into the night, I peeled off my mask. I saw with fresh eyes the jagged concrete, the steep descent into the subway with no elevator nearby, sights that I, an able-bodied person and one who knew no different, had come to accept as an inevitable part of the city, as natural as skin. But this kind of casual cruelty built into our everyday lives, isn’t normal, or at least doesn’t have to be. We could do better, and we should.
to hold a we continues at BRIC (647 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn) through December 22. The exhibition was 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 离离草, Cinthya Santos Briones, Dominic Bradley, Finnegan Shannon, Isabella Vargas, Linda Ryan, OlaRonke Akinmowo, Pelenakeke Brown, Steven Anthony Johnson II, and Yasi Ghanbari.
