Cripping FAA
(FAA = The College of Fine and Applied Arts)
Currently led by Christopher Jones, this project is designed to disseminate Crip* principals throughout the 11 units in our college via co-teaching collaborations with professors in each of those units—to discover and design new, crip-centric approaches to teaching within our college’s disciplines.
The project is currently being expanded and formalized with more co-teaching appointments starting in Fall 2023.
The Blue Description Project
The Blue Description Project (BDP) is an audio description and captioning project—produced by Crip* with support from Voices in the Gallery and LUX (both in London) that engages Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) via expanded and critical accessibility. We are commissioning an audio description track made up of visual descriptions of this film (which is often described as a film “with no image,” or with “nothing to look at”) generated by many different Crip/Disabled artists, community members, friends of Derek Jarman, students, and faculty. We are also commissioning a captioning track that will apply a more expansive captioning method to describe the non-spoken soundtrack of the film. The project will be shared at venues across the US and UK (including the Gene Siskel Film Center/SAIC, John Hansard Gallery, MCASD, LUX and others) starting in February of 2024 (a date that responds both to the 30th anniversary of the film’s original release and Derek Jarman’s death).
Crip* X BOW Fellowship Exchange
The Crip* X BOW Fellowship Exchange with the Chicago arts/disability program is led by Carrie Sandahl and Sandie Yi—Bodies of Work. Two fellows from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and three from UIC/Bodies of Work will participate in this year-long exchange which will culminate in a screening/event at the Museum of Contemporary Art on April 18, 2023. The exchange will also generate contributions to an accessible archive and library that are in preliminary stages of development.
Crip* Toward a Disability Aware Cities
Now in its second year of funding, this project focuses on addressing the barriers between campus and non-campus communities through access, inclusion and oral history. Project contributors work closely with students and members of the community who identify as Crip/Disabled and support them in creating narrative responses, or oral histories, to public sites both on campus and off campus. These oral histories are then shared in the sites where they were formed via a virtual map website and signage