About the Event
Cripping the Galleries is a collaborative series between the Art Institute of Chicago and Bodies of Work featuring local artists activating museums through the lens of crip* culture and access. This summer, artist and director of the Center for Mad Culture, Matt Bodett, leads an interactive writing workshop in response to artwork in the MCA galleries.
* Crip as a noun is pejorative, reclaimed by disabled people who embrace it as an outsider identity with an edge. To crip or cripping as a verb means to expose oppressive systems of normalcy and to imagine a world otherwise.
Access Information
CART captioning is provided for this event. To request additional accessibility services like ASL interpretation or audio description, please contact us at [email protected] or 312-397-4076.
About the Artist
Matt Bodett received his MFA from Boise State University in 2011 and moved to Chicago in 2013, where he has been a prominent advocate for disability and mad culture. In 2022, he founded the Center for Mad Culture, dedicated to exploring and amplifying the voices of those identifying with madness. Bodett currently teaches at Loyola University Chicago and serves on the board of the Good Hart Artist Residency.
As a visual artist, poet, and performer, Bodett’s work has been featured locally at venues including Steppenwolf Theatre, Victory Gardens Theater, The Poetry Foundation, and Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, and internationally at the Freud Museum in London, the No Limits Festival in Berlin, and others. His practice interrogates his lived experiences with madness, connecting Western art-historical ideals to contemporary understandings of madness as a viable identity. Bodett is driven by a belief in the transformative power of art to challenge societal narratives, foster empathy, and create space for mad voices in cultural conversations.
Event Partners
The Art Institute of Chicago shares its singular collections with our city and the world. They collect, care for, and interpret works of art across time, cultures, geographies, and identities, centering the vision of artists and makers. They recognize that all art is made in a particular context, demanding continual, dynamic reconsideration in the present. AIC is a place of gathering; they foster the exchange of ideas and inspire an expansive, inclusive understanding of human creativity.
Bodies of Work is a consortium of four programs at three Chicago organizations that share a commitment to programming that is distinguished by its integration of disability artistry, academics, and activism:
- Program on Disability Art, Culture, and Humanities and the Disability Cultural Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago;
- Disability Culture Activism Lab at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago;
- Art and Culture Project at Access Living.
Along with partnering artists and organizations, Bodies of Work serves as a catalyst for the development of disability art and culture that illuminates the disability experience in new and unexpected ways.
Funding
Lead support for Learning programs at the MCA is provided by Jana and Bernardo Hees.
Major support is provided by Carol Prins and John Hart/The Jessica Fund.
Additional generous support is provided by the Friends of Edwin A. Bergman Fund, the Hulda B. & Maurice L. Rothschild Foundation, Diane Kahan, The Marshall Frankel Foundation, and The William Randolph Hearst Foundations.