Projects/Events
Bodies of Work -April 20-30, 2006:
Embedded in all of our ethics conferences and seminars is a discussion of negative attitudes and misperceptions of life with disability. Where do people form their ideas about disability? What are their sources of information?
Every time I grapple with these questions I come back to the same answer—the arts. From the time we are children we are absorbing information and images from books, movies, TV, and pictures. Unfortunately the arts have often “gotten it wrong” when it comes to disability.
Captain Hook and Tiny Tim both play on the stereotypes—people with disabilities are either “evil” or are “too good for this world.” If that is all you know about people who have prosthetic arms or who use crutches, your frame of reference is severely flawed. For most of history the majority of the stories and images of people with disabilities have been created by “the other,” or those who do not have first-hand experience living with disability. This is now changing. With increasing prominence and fervor, people with disabilities are claiming art as an expression of their lived experience; in the words of actress Susan Nussbaum, they are “becoming authors of their own stories.”
The original concept for the Chicago Festival of Disability Arts and Culture grew out of meetings hosted by the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) Donnelley Family Disability Program in January, 2003.
This group quickly grew into a formal exploratory committee — the Disability Arts and Cultural Consortium of Chicago (DACC). The primary goal of the DACC was to promote the recognition of disability arts as an instrument of social change outside of rehabilitation or medical contexts. Members sought participation from the most recognized arts and culture organizations in the city in order to host a multi-day program of professional disability-based artists. It was from this consortium that Bodies of Work was born, with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs as the coordinator and fiduciary agent for the festival.
