The Access / Disability Services team is proud to facilitate an annual Disability is Diversity Week each spring semester at the end of February. The week is purposefully designed to build awareness, craft community, and celebrate disabled identities at CCA and beyond. The week highlights CCA artists in a Disability is Diversity exhibition, workshops on access and universal design for learning, celebration events with resources and giveaways, and community talks.

Each aspect of Disability is Diversity Week is intended to support the broadening of discussions and ideas we collectively have about what disability means. We work throughout the week to dismantle the idea that disability is inherently negative and celebrate the lives, work, and contributions disabled folks have brought to not only CCA but to the world at large. This week is one part of the Access/Disability Services team’s effort to amplify disabled experiences and give CCA community members the access, language, and space to start and continue discussions on disability as part of diversity.

It means celebrating what makes you different and having appreciation for it and not shame or fear.

The incredible artists involved in this exhibition are each valuable members of the CCA community. The exhibition presents work from students, faculty, and staff who represent a range of physically disabled and Neurodivergent identities.

It also presents work that reflects:

• the importance of accessibility,
• the impact of ableism,
• the need for disabled perspectives in art,
• and disability identity as a whole.

This exhibition is part of the Disability is Diversity Week at CCA; a week to engage the community in acknowledgement, visibility, education, and celebration of disability. Disability is Diversity Week is named to represent the notion that disability should be more present in our conversations on diversity, social justice, and inclusion.

Disability not only intersects with every identity under the umbrella of diversity but impacts everyone. We will all become disabled at one point in our lives and accessibility is a necessity. Crafting spaces to understand disabled perspectives now is invaluable, and a benefit for everyone.

Access / Disability Services believes offering space for community building, sharing experience, and highlighting the experiences of disabled individuals is essential to foster growth in our community. We hope that the work displayed here can create space for the experiences of disabled individuals, and empower artists who have so often been left out of the conversation.

Found Objects, Stuffing Animal, Threads, 2024. 7 x 13 x 4 inches.

Hossein never came back, Alireza was severely wounded and Manooch lost his leg. War was ridiculously nasty and we only were kids. ( Dedicated to Manooch )

Disability Belongs in Character Design, 2023. Digital, 11 x 8 inches.

An excerpt of a commissioned medical illustration depicting 10 different neurotransmitters as humanoid character designs. These 4 designs are visibly disabled and using a variety of mobility aids.

Sinking, 2022. Acrylic, collage paper, pen, 24 x 18 inches.

Depiction of the feelings of isolation and loneliness resulting from chronic illness

Fractured, 2023. Digital, 11 x 17 inches.

Death Plush, 2023. Minky fabric, acrylic yarn, stuffing, wire, thread, 8.5 x 5 x 5 inches.

This piece is a representation of what it is like to feel so lacking in life, and still make bright and beautiful things. Flowers grow from the death person’s hands, creating life, purpose, and escape. The death person without the flowers isn’t alive. The flowers without the death person may look prettier and happier, but they only become part of a real person when you accept what is behind them. Together, they make up a whole.

Exhaustion, 2024. Acrylic paint, 8 x 10 inches.

As an artist with an invisible disability it effects my day-to-day life. I'm tired every day, "low on spoons" if you will, because existing some days can be very draining. Putting aside the mental and physical exhaustion I'm also tired of the way disabled people are treated- from refusing accommodations, to lack of accessible buildings, to legalized torture/abuse.

And Then She Flew: Metamorphosis, 2023. Oil, dried flowers, 40 x 30 inches.

Death, like breathing, is involuntary and something we seem to ignore. We expect death to be definite, unpleasant, and final when truly it is remarkable, transcendental, and evolutionary. Everyone dies in their lifetime. Some more than others.

Thing that are living, 2024. Acrylic, 18 x 24 inches.

Finger model painting with cherry’s

Heading to the Occasion, 2024. Acrylic on canvas, 12 x 9 inches.

A school of fish heading to the occasion. What is the occasion? Up to you!

How I used to see, 2023. Acrylic, 18 x 24 inches.

My Bed, My World, 2023. Linocut Prints on Plant Dyed Found Linen, 14 x 14 inches.

Check out Rachel's art website Serpent and Bow

Visionary Book : Non-Icon, 2019. Ceramics with Majolica, 12 x 12 inches.

Like an apparition of a sacred face, this diachronic art references Italian renaissance depictions of Christ as a magical vision to explore what it means to be Italian but not Christian as a biethnic person. In dialogue with Hildegard of Bingen, and her feminine vision of a cosmic egg, I substitute a feminist orb for a medieval letter. Voldimar was her emanuencis when she wrote to the pope in Avignon. As a dyslexic who worked in clay before I could read a book, this cathartic sacred object pays homage to art itself by referencing times in the majority of human history when the majority of the population could not read and write. Iconography, didactic images, ornament, sound and color animated liturgy as weekly live performance art in community through ritual. And, yet, I come from a tradition where a bat mitzva requires that we read and write to know the sacred traditions of a book in a culture with no icons. There we can sing 🎶 our way orally in community out loud to have (Simchat Torah—or Jewish Joy) What if instead of only wallowing in the pain and exhaustion of living a neurodivergent life as a historically marginalized person intersectionally, I could expansively connect diachronically with the past of human vision and premodern epistemology beyond letters at all? What if I could experience the pleasure of bringing my students along for the ride? When I was little, my tutor detached the sounds from the letters and attached them to colors to teach me to read color without symbols or letters to remember. That was my liberation. This faux book, like a medieval miracle on cloth in Europe or a swayumbhu or self appearing icon in South Asia, is an aniconic tribute to my experience of the book as a biethnic, non-Christian, Judeo-Italian, dyslexic scholar, artist, and medievalist art historian. Or don’t read this at all and just rest your eyes 👀 on a picture book 📖 with no words fired into clay for posterity. A soothing vision past, present, and future in a decolonial understanding of my own scale of time on an indigenous calendar different from the country where I was born and still live.

Eternal Light, 2013. Drift wood, wire, and ceramics, 4 feet.

Eternal light is about duration and what it takes for light to shine for the long duree. This ceramic lamp like form has either been extinguished or never been lit -- both, it offers an archaeology of aspirational hope hung precariously and tenaticously on drift wood from the Bay Area. Is there a point of origin or a final resting place ever in Diaspora, and can we shine or only just fade and remember like a ceramic shard. The thick glaze crawled adding to the fake age-value this contemporary art evokes, playing with time like Alois Reigl in clay rather than words.

Don't Touch Me, 2024. Wood Scraps, Fur, Thread, 5.5 x 2 x 2.5 inches.

This piece relates to sensory overload and my personal experiences with touch and how that has been affected by neurodivergence.

You’re too Young, 2023. Poem.

Alt Text for Poem in images:

You're Too Young

By Malcolm Christie

"You're too young"

I'm too young

To be mentally ill?

To be queer?

To be trans?

To have chronic pain?

To be as broken as I am?

To be grown up?

To make my own choices?

What exactly am I too young for?

Was I too young when I was 10?

No one told me that then

They told me

"You're so mature for your age"

As if the trauma I experienced didn't do that

As if it was normal to be independent

To be fixing my family

To be facing what I saw

Yet, when I came out, all of that switched

As if I can be completely independent emotionally

But I can't make my own decisions

They only like me being grown up if it benefits them

When I do the dishes

When I clean the house

When I console my father

When I make my own lunches

When I take myself to every event

When I keep a calendar and update it regularly

When I find all the missing items they lose

When I cry alone in the corner so I don't burden anyone

When I am quiet

When I listen well

When I don't fight

When I hid in the shadows until my name is called

And the second it doesn't

I'm just a dumb child

Even now

When I go to get help

When my bones are grinding against each other

And pinching my nerves

They tell me it's not that bad

That I'm fine

It shouldn't be hurting me

As if I was 60 when it started

instead of freshly 18

As if the pain is imaginary

I'm "too young" for so much

But I'm also "too old"

What am I too old for?

To be running around?

To be laughing uncontrollably?

To be making mistakes?

To be learning?

To be whimsical?

To be excited?

No one noticed

when I didn't have the chance to experience that

When I was supposed to

As a kid

No one cared when I didn't get a childhood

But they make it my problem

when I get back that joy

The purity of a child's happiness

You Can Get Up and Walk Your Ass Out of Here Anytime You Want, Except When You Can't., 2023. Mixed Media Sculpture, 40 x 22 x 20 inches.

Destellos Caribeños, 2024. Photography, 48 x 84 inches.

Photography in Puerto Rico

We Are What We Put Into The World, 2024. Multi-media.

A multi-media installation including a performance video with projection overlays and self portrait photography with the overlay “We Are What We Put Into The World” with a makeup pallet, mirror, and sketchbook. Also includes scans of sketchbook page with “painting” I made while performing, a poem, and a sprawl of makeup I used.

(Click on the photo for a link to this work or use the Google Photos link: https://photos.app.goo.gl/KaLoMW4iyNPpLMGQ9)