Year in Review: Highlights 2022
This past year was filled with professional significance.
Along with Aimi Hamraie & Kevin Gotkin, I was named as a United States Artist Fellow in Media. This award is for our work practicing access as a creative, world-changing phenomenon that interrogates white and nondisabled design and media. We create open-access participation protocols, curating experiences of access making in which collaboration itself is an artistic practice.
Read more about the award: https://www.unitedstatesartists.org/fellow/critical-design-lab
Additionally, as a co-curator (with Aimie Hamraie and Cassandra Hartblay, it was amazing to see #CripRitual, an exhibition of artworks across 2 galleries in Toronto, finally open after multiple postponements due to the pandemic. We held 7 live artist events, talks & workshops, and gave 8 curator talks to multiple, varied audiences.
Read about the exhibition, see the artists’ work, and learn more at our archival website: https://cripritual.com
I was interviewed for multiple media pieces, though the one that stood out the most was as a guest on a podcast series, Data Dialogues, where Angela Eaton, OEDP’s Director of Data Inclusion interviewed me & Daphne Frias for episodes 4, 5, & 6:
#4: Climate Change is a Disabling Event (Daphne)
#5: Interdependence for Environmental Justice Design (Jarah)
#6: Averaged-out Data = Averaged-Out People (Daphne & Jarah together)
Take a listen, or read the transcript & show notes here: http://bit.ly/3s8rk2
This Fall, I was a participant in a number of academic & policy conferences and workshops. Two stand out:
One workshop was to rethink how metadata could provide better access for disabled people, and is part of a larger project with Dene Grigar’s Electronic Literature Lab’s The NEXT. My role was to begin articulating a schema to first create accessible pre–downloading/viewing information. This information is the first step to provide expectations of the experience.
Read more about it: https://trianglesci.org/2022/07/27/a-post-pandemic-reckoning-improving-metadata-for-better-accessibility-to-scholarly-archives-for-people-with-disabilities
Additionally, I recently was part of a fantastic panel on Disability In Space at the Space Education and Strategic Applications Virtual Conference with Lauryn Lee Hallet, Erika Nesvold, and Damien Williams. We talked about space policy and training, and how disabled people are more suited to space travel.
See a recording of the panel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA1a9zRi5y0&feature=youtu.be
And finally, I resigned from my position at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as of December 2022. While I love teaching (and my students are incredible people who are doing strong, thoughtful, and creative work), I am taking some time to continue working on some exciting projects. Stay tuned!
United States Artist Fellow Awardee in Media, 2022
I am honored to announce that I, along with Aimi Hamraie & Kevin Gotkin, as the Critical Design Lab, have been named as United States Artist Fellows in the Media Category.
The award honors creative accomplishments and supports ongoing artistic and professional development.
1) Aimi Hamraie, an olive-skinned Iranian transmasculine person with short dark curly hair, wears rectangular glasses, a plaid jacket over a blue collared shirt.
2) Jarah Moesch, a white person with short brown hair & glasses wears a patterned shirt. 3) Kevin Gotkin, a white person with a brown beard and brown glasses, looks back at the camera over their left shoulder. They wear a grey beanie hat, a black mesh shirt, and a light denim vest adorned with colorful feathers on the back. White text reads “Critical Design Lab, 2022 USA Fellow, Media. Critical Design Collective, Nashville, TN, Troy, NY, and Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY).
Read more about it here:
https://www.unitedstatesartists.org/2022-fellows
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an exhibition of artworks curated by The Critical Design Lab
(Jarah Moesch, Aimi Hamraie, Cassandra Hartblay) in collaboration with Tangled Art+Disability and the Doris McCarthy Gallery
Exhibition Dates:
January 21 – April 1, 2022
The show opens across two art galleries in the city of Toronto: Tangled Art + Disability, Toronto and the Doris McCarthy Gallery, University of Toronto Scarborough. You can also find #CripRitual online at CripRitual.com.
Join us for our remote/virtual public events
Works at Doris McCarthy Gallery by Khairani Barokka, Ezra Benus, Sky Cubacub, Aleksei Dymdymarchenko, Shannon Finnegan, Fran Flaherty, Stefana Fratila, Alex Haagaard, Danielle Hyde, Yo-Yo Lin, Leena Raudvee, RA Walden, Sara Prisma Williston
Works at Tangled Art + Disability by Cassidy Bankson, Faye Harnest, Earl LeBlanc and Dawn McLeod, Malcolm and Maria Corley, Margeaux Feldman, Maryam Hafizirad, Logan Quinn, Hanna Sheehan, Jessica Watkin
Rituals are transformative: they change us and the world around us, whether through incantation or ceremony, private practice or public protest. Academic theories of ritual hold that rituals are embedded in cultural worlds, and that all cultures have rituals of world-building. With the phrase “crip ritual,” this exhibition puts these theories in conversation with disability culture, as understood by disability justice movements and disability studies. Artworks in the exhibition use ritual to foreground understandings of disabled, crip, d/Deaf, Mad, and Sick people’s experiences. #CripRitual highlights strategies for building crip power: the ceremonies, habits, celebrations, design practices, social scripts, and community agreements, grounded in disabled knowledge and experience, that undergird disability culture.
We invite visitors to the exhibition — at two galleries and online — to consider what kinds of crip rituals are represented in these works and resonate in their own lives. In these works we find rituals of activism, rituals of care, rituals for managing the way that others perceive you, and rituals of joy and celebration. What’s your #CripRitual?
Remote /Virtual Tours
Both galleries are offering virtual tours of the exhibition, so you can engage with the works from the comfort of your own home. Tours will be over Zoom, and will be auto-captioned. ASL and audio description are available upon request.
Virtual tours of Tangled Art Gallery are offered Thursdays – Saturdays, appointments can be made through Tangled’s booking page.
Virtual tours of the Doris McCarthy Gallery are offered on Fridays, appointments can be made through DMG’s booking page.
About Critical Design Lab
The Critical Design Lab is a collective of disabled, crip, and neuroqueer maker-theorists and allies. Our lab creates public-facing projects rooted in a critical design practice informed by disability culture and science and technology studies. Other Critical Design Lab projects include Remote Access, and the Contra* Podcast. The lead curators for this exhibition are Jarah Moesch, Aimi Hamraie, and Cassandra Hartblay, in collaboration with our colleagues at Tangled Art+Disability and the Doris McCarthy Gallery.
More info:
Doris McCarthy Gallery: https://dorismccarthygallery.
Tangled Art Gallery: https://tangledarts.org/
#CripRitual site: https://CripRitual.com
Critical Design Lab: https://www.mapping-access.
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Guest on the Data Dialogues Podcast
I am excited to be a guest on the Data Dialogues Podcast over at Open Environmental Data! The series brings together folks in the environmental movement to discuss their learnings and reflections working with environmental data.
“A full Data Dialogue consists of three episodes: two guests each have their own 15 – 20 minute 1:1 “highlight segments” with Angela Eaton, OEDP’s Director of Data Inclusion, followed by a shared 30 – 40 minute group conversation between Angela and both guests” (per their website).
Episodes 4, 5, 6 are with me & Daphne Frias:
4: Climate Change is a Disabling Event (Daphne)
5: Interdependence for Environmental Justice Design (Jarah)
6: Averaged-out Data = Averaged-Out People (Daphne & Jarah together)
Our episodes air February 15, and the series has new episodes every Tuesday from Feb 8 to March 15!
Listen, learn more, &subscribe here: http://bit.ly/3s8rk24