This page contains links to articles, interviews, and videos that can be incorporated into your syllabus in preparation for an event or afterward for post-event discussion and research. Go to saic.edu/cate for detailed event information.
Liza Sylvestre and Christopher Jones: The Blue Description Project
Thursday, February 15, 6:00 p.m. CT
Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.
Please note that All CATE events will have real-time captioning (CART). Hearing loops, wheelchair seating, and companion seating are also available at the Gene Siskel Film Center. For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or write cate@saic.edu
In 1993, the British artist Derek Jarman released Blue, an epoch-defining account of AIDS, illness, and the experience of disability in a culture of repressive heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness. Despite being referred to as a feature film, Blue was also simulcast on television and radio, released as a CD, and published as a book, creating many different ways to experience the work. The Blue Description Project, conceived by artists and writers Liza Sylvestre and Christopher Jones, builds on the multifaceted nature of Blue through newly commissioned and expansive accessibility. Reflecting Blue’s standing as a foundational work of Crip art, the project challenges ableist hierarchies in art while focusing on the generative possibilities of difference and interdependence. Sylvestre and Jones will join us for an extended conversation about the project afterward.
The Blue Description Project is produced by Crip*—Cripistemology and the Arts, a transdisciplinary initiative in the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in partnership with Sarah Hayden and the Voices in the Gallery research initiative at the University of Southampton.
Liza Sylvestre is a multimedia artist and research assistant professor within the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where she has co-founded the initiative Crip*—Cripistemology and the Arts. Her work has been shown internationally, including the Plains Art Museum (Fargo), Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis), John Hansard Gallery (Southampton), ARGOS (Brussels), and Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt). Sylvestre has been the recipient of both an Artists Initiative and Arts Learning grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, a fellowship through Art(ists) on the Verge, a VSA Jerome Emerging Artist Grant, an Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship, and a fellowship from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. She has been artist-in-residence at the Weisman Art Museum and the Center for Applied and Translational Sensory Science. In 2019, she received a Citizens Advocate Award from the Minnesota Commission of the Deaf, DeafBlind, and Hard of Hearing. Sylvestre’s work has been written about in numerous publications and books including Art in America, Mousse Magazine, Ocula Magazine, Art Monthly, and SciArt Magazine.
Christopher Robert Jones is an artist and writer based in Illinois. Their research revolves around the “failure” or “malfunctioning” of the body and how those experiences are situated at points of intersection between Queer and Crip discourses. They are a regular contributor to Art Papers magazine and their work has recently been exhibited at the Krannert Art Museum, Gallery 400, and the Weisman Art Museum. Jones is the co-founder of Crip*—Cripistemology and the Arts, a transdisciplinary initiative that is housed within the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where they are also a research assistant professor.
Liza Sylvestre [Article]
Nguyen, Minh | Art in America Vol. 107 (8) | p. 20 | 2019
Blue [Chapter]
Wollen, Peter | in Paris/Manhattan: Writings on Art | New York: Verso | 2004
Blue by
"For Blue there are no boundaries or solutions." --Derek Jarman Originally released as a feature film in 1993, the year before the acclaimed artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman's death due to an AIDS-related illness, Blue is a daring and powerful work of art. The film - and this highly-anticipated book's text - serve as iconoclastic responses to the lack of political engagement with the AIDS crisis. Written poetically and surrealistically, Jarman's text moves through myriad scenes, some banal, others fantastical. Stories of quotidian life--getting coffee, reading the newspaper, and walking down the sidewalk--escalate to visions of Marco Polo, the Taj Mahal, or blue fighting yellow. Facing death and a cascade of pills, Jarman presents his illness in delirium and metaphors. He contemplates the physicality of emotions in lyrical prose as he grounds this story in the constant return to Blue - a color, a feeling, a funk. Michael Charlesworth's compelling introduction brings Blue into conversation with Jarman's visual paintings as never before.
Chroma by
Chroma: A Book of Color is a meditation on the color spectrum by Britain's most controversial filmmaker. From the explosions of image and color in Edward II, The Last of England, The Garden, and Wittgenstein, to the somber blacks of his collages and tar paintings, Derek Jarman has consistently used color in unprecedented ways. In his signature style, a lyrical combination of classic theory, anecdote and poetry, Jarman takes the reader through the spectrum, introducing each color as an embodiment of an emotion, evoking memories or dreams.
Blue Cripistemologies: In and Around Derek Jarman [Article]
Jones, Christopher Robert | Art Papers | Summer 2021
Curating Access by
This book is an interdisciplinary collection of twenty-four essays which critically examine contemporary exhibitions and artistic practices that focus on conceptual and creative aspects of access. Oftentimes exhibitions tack on access once the artwork has already been executed and ready to be installed in the museum or gallery. But what if the artists were to ponder access as an integral and critical part of their artwork? Can access be creative and experimental? And furthermore, can the curator also fold access into their practice, while working collaboratively with artists, considering it as a theoretical and practical generative force that seeks to make an exhibition more engaging for a wider diversity of audiences? This volume includes essays by a growing number of artists, curators, and scholars who ponder these ideas of ad-hoc, experimental and underground approaches within exhibition-making and artistic practices. It considers how, through these nascent exhibition models and art practices, enhanced experiences of access in the museum can be a shared responsibility amongst museum workers, curators, and artists, in tandem with the public, so that access becomes a zone of intellectual and creative "accommodation," rather than strictly a discourse on policy. The book provides innovative case studies which provide a template for how access might be implemented by individuals, artists, curators, museum administrators and educators given the growing need to offer as many modalities of access as possible within cultural institutions. This book shows that anyone can be a curator of access and demonstrates how to approach access in a way that goes beyond protocol and policy. It will thus be of interest to students and scholars engaged in the study of museums, art history and visual culture, disability, culture, and communication.
Crip Theory by
A bold and contemporary discourse of the intersection of disability studies and queer studies Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over. Both disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned with how bodies, pleasures, and identities are represented as "normal" or as abject, but Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly the ways in which these interdisciplinary fields inform each other. Drawing on feminist theory, African American and Latino/a cultural theories, composition studies, film and television studies, and theories of globalization and counter-globalization, Robert McRuer articulates the central concerns of crip theory and considers how such a critical perspective might impact cultural and historical inquiry in the humanities. Crip Theory puts forward readings of the Sharon Kowalski story, the performance art of Bob Flanagan, and the journals of Gary Fisher, as well as critiques of the domesticated queerness and disability marketed by the Millennium March, or Bravo TV's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. McRuer examines how dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities are composed, and considers the vibrant ways that disability and queerness unsettle and re-write those identities in order to insist that another world is possible.
This Set of Actions is a Mirror: Discussion with Dustin Gibson, Robert McRuer, and Liza Sylvestre [Video]*
Dustin Gibson, Robert, McRuer, Liza Sylvestre, Minh Nguyen, and Amy Beste, Amy
School of the Art Institute of Chicago | “Conversations at the Edge” | 2021
*This is a Flaxman Library Resource that requires ARTIC Login
Conversations at the Edge Lecture Recordings
Conversation at the Edge video recordings (2016–present.) Available with SAIC login credentials.