This is an installation I first created for i wanna be with you everywhere‘s summer solstice gathering/ all day and night outdoor disabled arts festival in 2023. coming out of three years of losing two of my closest friends/comrades, both disabled, fat working class BIPOC queers, to deaths inflicted by the medical industrial complex, along with my father and watching loves ones lose family and kin, I wanted to create an altar space for the the disabled beloved dead.
iwbwye was one of the first in person gatherings by and for disabled people in three years of the pandemic. let that sink in. it was one of the first times we’d been in a group setting- that phrase sounds too much like “group home” or “facility” to me, but what I mean is- a place to kick it and hang out together, a club, a party, a performance night, a place to be together, breathe together, smell each other, laugh, cry and talk shit… for literally years. for a minute “everyone” was in lockdown, but after most people threw that off, we were still out of the public, isolated in our covid-safer apartments. crip art and community spaces have never been thick on the ground, esp those made by and centering Black and brown disabled and sick folks, but the last three years of the pandemic had pulled them all away. and yeah Zoom is real and we made it crip realer than real. and yeah we also were suffering from not being able to be bodies breathing next to each other.
almost all of us had been grieving losing many people to death, mostly via ableist racist murder, and we’d mostly been grieving alone in our apartments, in precious or with one or two other people. the weight of that collective disabled BIPOC grief was, is heavy. in that pandemic third year, I wanted to create an altar space to hold the weight of that grief, and be a portal to maybe transform it.
we set up under the only tree in the courtyard of performance space new york, with a canopy to provide shade yet also air circulation, open walled and free for wheelchair and mobility device users to access, with benches to sit underneath. strung with tiny copper wire fairy lights from target wrapped around images of disabled beloved dead, mostly Black and brown, from artists Jen White Johnson, Claudia Leung, Derek Dizon and Såhi Velasco. Among them Engracia Figueroa, Elandria Williams, Stacey Park Milbern, bell hooks, Lucia Leandro Gimeno, and Mama Cax, alongside artwork that proclaimed messages like “I hope I dream of disabled ancestors tonight” and “Black autistic lives matter.”
Below, an altar table holding fresh flowers, candles, (including candles for visitors to light) tea, honey, candies, salt water, lace and space. To be, and for visitors to bring images and offerings of their own beloved dead.
The disabled grief portal altar is many things: An articulation that disabled Black and brown life is sacred. That our dead are sacred, and that they aren’t just “better off dead” they are martyrs, they are mourned. The inclusion of both “well known” figures, figures known to be disabled and figures like hooks who lived Black disabled lives and deaths but who may not be included in the official white count of disability, are a disability justice, non-white disabled intervention into the idea of what disabled looks like, exists like.
It is also a space for disabled grief to be held, individually and collectively. Mourners who came were not alone with their grief. People talked, touched hands and leaned sides. They also were able to sit in stillness,undisturbed yet not alone. The open sidedness of the canopy space allows room for spirits and grief to fly in and out. A community, which is often told we are not a community, holds a space to bear witness and shift grief, together.
