.jpeg)
Related Programs
Don't mind if I do
Where
Lewis Gallery
When
Jul 7-Dec 31, 2023
Finnegan Shannon, Here to Lounge, 2020.
Cushions, cut-out letters, lazy susans, artist multiples by Alex Dolores Salerno, Carly Mandel, Christine Sun Kim, Jeff Kasper, Jillian Crochet, Pelenakeke Brown, Rebirth Garments, Sandra Wazaz, and Yo-Yo Lin.
Photo by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo
Organized in collaboration with Finnegan Shannon
About
Finnegan Shannon will create an expanded iteration of their experiments with seating-centric exhibitions. In this show, the artwork comes to the visitor, and all things can be picked up and touched. Audience members become participants in this experiential exhibition. Encouraging visitors to handle the works presented has the potential to bring them deeper into the exhibition, forming their own relationships with the artists.
The project includes works by artists from the disability arts ecosystem that has nourished Shannon’s practice and with whom Shannon often collaborates. Placing these individuals directly in conversation demonstrates the importance of community and the ways in which connections—both between artists and between artworks—inform how audiences make meaning.
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo (they/them/Lukaza) is an artist, activist, educator, storyteller, cultural worker and person of multitudes. Through a practice based in the printed multiple, community-based work, painting, performance and installation building, they invite the viewer to recall and share their own lived narratives, offering power and weight to the creation of a larger dialogue around the telling of B.I.Q.T.P.O.C. (Black, Indigenous, Queer, Trans, People of color) stories. Branfman-Verissimo has had solo shows at SEPTEMBER Gallery [Kinderhook, NY], Deli Gallery [New York City, NY], Roll Up Projects [Oakland, CA], Printed Matter Inc. [New York City, NY] and STNDRD Projects [Steuben, WI]. Their work has been included in exhibitions and performances at Konsthall C [Stockholm, Sweden], EFA Project Space [New York City, NY], San Francisco Arts Commision [San Francisco,CA], Leslie Lohman Museum [New York City, NY], Yerba Buena Center for the Arts [San Francisco, CA], and L’Internationale Online, amongst others. They have been awarded residencies and fellowships at The University of New Mexico, Black Space Residency, Kala Art Center, Women’s Studio Workshop, ACRE Residency. Lukaza’s artist books and printed editions have been published by Endless Editions, Childish Books, Press Press and Printed Matter Inc. and is in the permanent collections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, California College of the Arts Printmaking Archive, University of California Santa Cruz Library, New York University Special Collections and San Francisco Museum of Art Library.
Pelenakeke Brown
Pelenakeke Brown (she/her) is a queer, crip, indigenous artist and writer. Brown's practice explores the intersections between disability theory and Sāmoan concepts. Her work investigates sites of knowledge(s), and she uses technology, writing, poetry, and performance to explore these ideas.
Brown has worked with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gibney Dance Center, The New York Library for the Performing Arts and other institutions globally. Selected residencies include Eyebeam, The Laundromat Project, and Dance/NYC. Her work has been featured in Art in America and she was recognised in 2020 with a Creative New Zealand Pacific Toa award.
Pelenakeke Brown.Photo credit, Papa clothing x Emily Parr.
Sky Cubacub
Sky Cubacub of Rebirth Garments (they/them/xey/xem/xyr) is a non-binary xenogender and disabled Filipinx neuroqueer from Chicago, IL. They are the creator of Rebirth Garments, a line of wearables for trans, queer and disabled people of all sizes and ages, which started in summer 2014. Sky is the editor of the Radical Visibility Zine, a full color cut and paste style zine that celebrates disabled queer life, with an emphasis on joy. As a multidisciplinary artist, Sky is interested in fulfilling the needs for disabled queer life, with an emphasis on joy. Additionally they are the Access Brat and the editor of a section on ethics and inclusion called “Cancel & Gretel” at literary fashion magazine “Just Femme and Dandy”. Sky has also created a queer fashion program series with Chicago Public Library Called Radical Fit. They have had over 50 fashion performances and lectured at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Utah, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Northwestern University. Rebirth Garments has been featured in Teen Vogue, Nylon, Playboy, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Vice, Wussy Mag, and the New York Times. Sky was named 2018 Chicagoan of the Year by the Chicago Tribune and is a 2019/2020 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist and a Disability Futures Fellow.
Sky Cubacub. Photo by @colectivomultipolar.
Felicia Griffin
Felicia Griffin (she/her, b. 1963) is a prolific multimedia artist based in Richmond, California. She has been exhibiting work with Nurturing Independence Through Artistic Development (NIAD) Art Center since 1985.
(The following is an edited excerpt from a conversation between Felicia Griffin and former NIAD art facilitator Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo. The complete interview can be found in Issue 6 of New Life Quarterly, published by E.M. Wolfman Books.
What would you like us to know about you? Who is Felicia Griffin?
Um, well, I like to . . . have fun and I love my friends and I want to do some more pompoms and I like doing my art.
What are you working on right now?
A pompom. I made two pillows and put pompoms on the pillows.
Why do you like to make art that involves circles?
That’s a repeated shape in your pompoms, prints, and paintings—where does that circle shape come from?
The circle is inside of me, a square too. I see it in the world too.
You engage with a lot of people while you work—how does that relate to your art making?
Yep, I like doing it and um, I like to help out. It makes me feel happy! I started doing this: giving gifts. I am always looking out for who needs help.
Do you consider [other artists] your family?
YEEEAAAAS! I care for people—yes!
Felicia Griffin. Photo credit: Andria Lo.
Jeff Kasper
Jeff Kasper (he/him) is an artist, writer, and educator. He works with the tools and techniques of design, contemplative practices, and community engagement, to create public art, publications, open editions, workshops, and participatory learning projects. His artworks center dialogical, reflective, and instructional texts that often prompt meditation, relationship building, and serious play. Based on his own lived experiences and observations, much of his recent projects explore topics of support, safety, and proximity. Through his disability arts organizing, he opens up spaces for (re)imagining accessible and trauma-aware futures. His recent exhibitions have been presented internationally, including with New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, Meta Open Arts, and Queens Museum, and his past public programs have been facilitated with BRIC, CUE Art Foundation, and moCa Cleveland. Kasper is Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the Department of Art.
Jeff Kasper
Emilie Louise Gossiaux
Emilie Louise Gossiaux (she/her) received a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art in 2014, and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art in 2019. Since losing her vision due to a traffic accident in 2010, Gossiaux’s altered experiences have influenced her practice's trajectory—drawing on inspiration from dreams, memories, and non-visual sensory perceptions. Gossiaux connects to landscape and body without sight. As such, her drawings and ceramics pertain deeply to bodily autonomy, exploring themes such as love, intimacy, and the interdependent relationships between humans and non-human species. Much of her work is inspired by the interspecies bond she has with her Guide Dog, London, and celebrates disability pride. Simultaneously, she disrupts the Anthropocene understanding of agency and the hierarchic ordering between humans and animals.
Gossiaux's recent solo shows include Significant Otherness at Mother Gallery (New York, NY); Memory of a Body at Mother Gallery (Beacon, NY); and After Image at False Flag Gallery (New York, NY). Her participation in group shows, both domestic and internationally, include The John Michael Kohler Art Center (Sheboygan, WI, 2023); the Wellcome Collection (London, UK, 2022); 1969 Gallery (New York, NY 2022); The Aldrich Museum (Ridgefield, CT, 2022); Gallery 400 (Chicago, IL 2022); MoMA PS 1 (New York, NY 2021); Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt (Frankfurt, Germany, 2021); The Krannert Art Museum (Champagne, IL, 2021); The Shed (New York, NY, 2021); SculptureCenter (New York, NY, 2020); and The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum (New York, NY, 2018).
Gossiaux was awarded a John F. Kennedy Center’s VSA Prize (2013), the Wynn Newhouse Award (2019), a NYFA Barbara and Carl Zydney Grant (2021), the Colene Brown Art Prize (2022), The Queens Museum Jerome Foundation Fellowship (2022), and The Pébéo Production Prize (2023). Her work has been featured in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail, The New Yorker, Art in America, and Topical Cream Magazine.
Emilie Louise Gossiaux
Finnegan Shannon
Finnegan Shannon (b. 1989, Berkeley, CA) is a project-based artist. They experiment with forms of access that intervene in ableist structures with humor, earnestness, rage, and delight. Some of their recent work includes Anti-Stairs Club Lounge, an ongoing project that gathers people together who share an aversion to stairs; Alt-Text as Poetry, a collaboration with Bojana Coklyat that explores the expressive potential of image description; and Do You Want Us Here or Not, a series of benches and cushions designed for exhibition spaces. They have done projects with Banff Centre, Queens Museum, the High Line, MMK Frankfurt, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and Nook Gallery. Their work has been supported by a 2018 Wynn Newhouse Award, a 2019 residency at Eyebeam, 2020 grant from Art Matters Foundation, and a 2022 grant from The Canada Council for the Arts. Their work has been written about in Art in America, BOMB Magazine, The Believer, and the New York Times. They live and work in Brooklyn, NY.
Finnegan Shannon
Don't mind if I do
Where
Lewis Gallery
When
Jul 7-Dec 31, 2023
Finnegan Shannon, Here to Lounge, 2020.
Cushions, cut-out letters, lazy susans, artist multiples by Alex Dolores Salerno, Carly Mandel, Christine Sun Kim, Jeff Kasper, Jillian Crochet, Pelenakeke Brown, Rebirth Garments, Sandra Wazaz, and Yo-Yo Lin.
Photo by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo
Organized in collaboration with Finnegan Shannon
About
Finnegan Shannon will create an expanded iteration of their experiments with seating-centric exhibitions. In this show, the artwork comes to the visitor, and all things can be picked up and touched. Audience members become participants in this experiential exhibition. Encouraging visitors to handle the works presented has the potential to bring them deeper into the exhibition, forming their own relationships with the artists.
The project includes works by artists from the disability arts ecosystem that has nourished Shannon’s practice and with whom Shannon often collaborates. Placing these individuals directly in conversation demonstrates the importance of community and the ways in which connections—both between artists and between artworks—inform how audiences make meaning.
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo (they/them/Lukaza) is an artist, activist, educator, storyteller, cultural worker and person of multitudes. Through a practice based in the printed multiple, community-based work, painting, performance and installation building, they invite the viewer to recall and share their own lived narratives, offering power and weight to the creation of a larger dialogue around the telling of B.I.Q.T.P.O.C. (Black, Indigenous, Queer, Trans, People of color) stories. Branfman-Verissimo has had solo shows at SEPTEMBER Gallery [Kinderhook, NY], Deli Gallery [New York City, NY], Roll Up Projects [Oakland, CA], Printed Matter Inc. [New York City, NY] and STNDRD Projects [Steuben, WI]. Their work has been included in exhibitions and performances at Konsthall C [Stockholm, Sweden], EFA Project Space [New York City, NY], San Francisco Arts Commision [San Francisco,CA], Leslie Lohman Museum [New York City, NY], Yerba Buena Center for the Arts [San Francisco, CA], and L’Internationale Online, amongst others. They have been awarded residencies and fellowships at The University of New Mexico, Black Space Residency, Kala Art Center, Women’s Studio Workshop, ACRE Residency. Lukaza’s artist books and printed editions have been published by Endless Editions, Childish Books, Press Press and Printed Matter Inc. and is in the permanent collections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, California College of the Arts Printmaking Archive, University of California Santa Cruz Library, New York University Special Collections and San Francisco Museum of Art Library.
Pelenakeke Brown.Photo credit, Papa clothing x Emily Parr.
Pelenakeke Brown
Pelenakeke Brown (she/her) is a queer, crip, indigenous artist and writer. Brown's practice explores the intersections between disability theory and Sāmoan concepts. Her work investigates sites of knowledge(s), and she uses technology, writing, poetry, and performance to explore these ideas.
Brown has worked with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gibney Dance Center, The New York Library for the Performing Arts and other institutions globally. Selected residencies include Eyebeam, The Laundromat Project, and Dance/NYC. Her work has been featured in Art in America and she was recognised in 2020 with a Creative New Zealand Pacific Toa award.
Sky Cubacub. Photo by @colectivomultipolar.
Sky Cubacub
Sky Cubacub of Rebirth Garments (they/them/xey/xem/xyr) is a non-binary xenogender and disabled Filipinx neuroqueer from Chicago, IL. They are the creator of Rebirth Garments, a line of wearables for trans, queer and disabled people of all sizes and ages, which started in summer 2014. Sky is the editor of the Radical Visibility Zine, a full color cut and paste style zine that celebrates disabled queer life, with an emphasis on joy. As a multidisciplinary artist, Sky is interested in fulfilling the needs for disabled queer life, with an emphasis on joy. Additionally they are the Access Brat and the editor of a section on ethics and inclusion called “Cancel & Gretel” at literary fashion magazine “Just Femme and Dandy”. Sky has also created a queer fashion program series with Chicago Public Library Called Radical Fit. They have had over 50 fashion performances and lectured at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Utah, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Northwestern University. Rebirth Garments has been featured in Teen Vogue, Nylon, Playboy, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Vice, Wussy Mag, and the New York Times. Sky was named 2018 Chicagoan of the Year by the Chicago Tribune and is a 2019/2020 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist and a Disability Futures Fellow.
Felicia Griffin. Photo credit: Andria Lo.
Felicia Griffin
Felicia Griffin (she/her, b. 1963) is a prolific multimedia artist based in Richmond, California. She has been exhibiting work with Nurturing Independence Through Artistic Development (NIAD) Art Center since 1985.
(The following is an edited excerpt from a conversation between Felicia Griffin and former NIAD art facilitator Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo. The complete interview can be found in Issue 6 of New Life Quarterly, published by E.M. Wolfman Books.
What would you like us to know about you? Who is Felicia Griffin?
Um, well, I like to . . . have fun and I love my friends and I want to do some more pompoms and I like doing my art.
What are you working on right now?
A pompom. I made two pillows and put pompoms on the pillows.
Why do you like to make art that involves circles?
That’s a repeated shape in your pompoms, prints, and paintings—where does that circle shape come from?
The circle is inside of me, a square too. I see it in the world too.
You engage with a lot of people while you work—how does that relate to your art making?
Yep, I like doing it and um, I like to help out. It makes me feel happy! I started doing this: giving gifts. I am always looking out for who needs help.
Do you consider [other artists] your family?
YEEEAAAAS! I care for people—yes!
Jeff Kasper
Jeff Kasper
Jeff Kasper (he/him) is an artist, writer, and educator. He works with the tools and techniques of design, contemplative practices, and community engagement, to create public art, publications, open editions, workshops, and participatory learning projects. His artworks center dialogical, reflective, and instructional texts that often prompt meditation, relationship building, and serious play. Based on his own lived experiences and observations, much of his recent projects explore topics of support, safety, and proximity. Through his disability arts organizing, he opens up spaces for (re)imagining accessible and trauma-aware futures. His recent exhibitions have been presented internationally, including with New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, Meta Open Arts, and Queens Museum, and his past public programs have been facilitated with BRIC, CUE Art Foundation, and moCa Cleveland. Kasper is Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the Department of Art.
Emilie Louise Gossiaux
Emilie Louise Gossiaux
Emilie Louise Gossiaux (she/her) received a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art in 2014, and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art in 2019. Since losing her vision due to a traffic accident in 2010, Gossiaux’s altered experiences have influenced her practice's trajectory—drawing on inspiration from dreams, memories, and non-visual sensory perceptions. Gossiaux connects to landscape and body without sight. As such, her drawings and ceramics pertain deeply to bodily autonomy, exploring themes such as love, intimacy, and the interdependent relationships between humans and non-human species. Much of her work is inspired by the interspecies bond she has with her Guide Dog, London, and celebrates disability pride. Simultaneously, she disrupts the Anthropocene understanding of agency and the hierarchic ordering between humans and animals.
Gossiaux's recent solo shows include Significant Otherness at Mother Gallery (New York, NY); Memory of a Body at Mother Gallery (Beacon, NY); and After Image at False Flag Gallery (New York, NY). Her participation in group shows, both domestic and internationally, include The John Michael Kohler Art Center (Sheboygan, WI, 2023); the Wellcome Collection (London, UK, 2022); 1969 Gallery (New York, NY 2022); The Aldrich Museum (Ridgefield, CT, 2022); Gallery 400 (Chicago, IL 2022); MoMA PS 1 (New York, NY 2021); Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt (Frankfurt, Germany, 2021); The Krannert Art Museum (Champagne, IL, 2021); The Shed (New York, NY, 2021); SculptureCenter (New York, NY, 2020); and The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum (New York, NY, 2018).
Gossiaux was awarded a John F. Kennedy Center’s VSA Prize (2013), the Wynn Newhouse Award (2019), a NYFA Barbara and Carl Zydney Grant (2021), the Colene Brown Art Prize (2022), The Queens Museum Jerome Foundation Fellowship (2022), and The Pébéo Production Prize (2023). Her work has been featured in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail, The New Yorker, Art in America, and Topical Cream Magazine.
Finnegan Shannon
Finnegan Shannon
Finnegan Shannon (they/them) is a project-based artist. They experiment with forms of access that intervene in ableist structures with humor, earnestness, rage, and delight. Some of their recent work includes Anti-Stairs Club Lounge, an ongoing project that gathers people together who share an aversion to stairs; Alt-Text as Poetry, a collaboration with Bojana Coklyat that explores the expressive potential of image description; and Do You Want Us Here or Not, a series of benches and cushions designed for exhibition spaces. They have done projects with Banff Centre, Queens Museum, the High Line, MMK Frankfurt, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and Nook Gallery. Their work has been supported by a 2018 Wynn Newhouse Award, a 2019 residency at Eyebeam, 2020 grant from Art Matters Foundation, and a 2022 grant from The Canada Council for the Arts. Their work has been written about in Art in America, BOMB Magazine, The Believer, and the New York Times. They live and work in Brooklyn, NY.
free to all
