Photo by Isaac Yuquan Duan
Art/Access Lab: Archiving Disability
Presented in Partnership with Unfolding Disability Futures
Art/Access Labs foster a vibrant disabled artist ecosystem through cross-discipline and cross-impairment professional development activities.
*Hybrid Event* Attend in person or via Zoom
Doors at 1:30pm
Event starts at 2:00pm and ends at 4:00pm
Join us for an artist-led conversation around disability, art, and the archive with Bri Noonan, Reveca Torres, and Tempestt Hazel. Working in different ways to engage with, investigate, and create archives, these three artists will discuss the issues and opportunities they encounter in their practices. We’ll focus especially on what it means to engage with archives when one’s community has been historically harmed or omitted from historical records, how we center crip/disabled ways of collecting, creating, and preserving knowledge, and how artists play an important role in these processes.
Art/Access Labs are centered around artists with a lived experience of disability including Deaf, disabled, sick, neurodivergent, and Mad artists, and those working through their relationship to these categories, working in all mediums. Anyone who is invested in fostering a vibrant disabled artist ecosystem in Chicago is encouraged to participate.
About the Artists
Bri Noonan (they/them) is a queer, disabled, non-binary artist based in Chicago, IL, where they are currently a PhD Candidate in Disability Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. They graduated with a BFA in Photography in May 2013 and a MA in Social and Cultural Pedagogy with a Certificate in Disability Studies in May 2021 from Arizona State University. Their work explores disability and queerness in conversation with crip and queer theory, often utilizing artistic and media narratives to investigate queer disabled ways of knowing and lineages.
For more information about the artist, visit https://www.briananoonan.com/.
Reveca Torres is an artist, filmmaker and disability advocate. She is a 2023-24 Firelight Media Doc Lab Fellow and was a Kartemquin Films Diverse Voices in Docs fellow (2017) and selected for Kartemquin + Hulu Accelerator program in 2020. In 2020 Reveca was one of four fellows for International Documentary Association’s (IDA) Documentary Magazine Editorial Fellowship and was awarded the inaugural Craig Neilsen Visionary Prize for her work in art and advocacy. She is on IDA’s Nonfiction Access Initiative board and member of FWD-Doc. Reveca was a 3Arts fellow in 2018, a 3Arts awardee in 2020, and a 3Arts Next Level recipient in 2022. She currently serves on 3Arts Artist Advisory Board and is a board member at Artist Communities Alliance. Reveca is the founder and Executive Director of BACKBONES, an organization helping people with spinal cord injury and disabilities and former co-director of ReelAbilities Film Festival Chicago (2015-2021). Reveca has curated touring photography and art exhibitions that showcase the work of people with disabilities and bring awareness to disability rights. She uses painting, illustration, photography, film, movement, and other media as a form of expression and a tool for advocacy and social justice.
For more information about the artist, visit https://www.revecatorres.com/.
Tempestt Hazel is a curator, writer, and co-founder of Sixty Inches From Center, a collective of writers, artists, archivists, memory workers, arts workers, and organizers who have published and produced collaborative projects in the Great Lakes and Great Plains region since 2010. Her ongoing work with Sixty is rooted in advocacy for the creative health and livelihoods of arts workers, the development of restorative cultural infrastructures, and co-creating regional support networks for writers and artists in the Midwest. Most recently she served as the facilitator for the 2025 ChicagoCritic’s Table at the University of Chicago (created by Adrienne Brown), a member of the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Creating Future Memory convening and legacy council, and an advisory board member of the Archives of American Art Journal. Tempestt is a recipient of the 2025 Rabkin Prize for arts writers and the 2019 J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists for her work in Black legacy preservation and artist archives.
For more information about the artist, visit https://www.tempestthazel.com/.
Access Services
Access & Venue: This event is intended to be supportive and welcoming for everyone. We will have multiple forms of seating available, as well as stim materials and ear defenders. You are welcome to come and go, bring your own access tools, and move about the space as needed during the event. ASL interpretation and open captions will be provided. All speakers will use microphones. Agendas will be provided to all registrants in both text and symbol-based formats. AI Captioning available via zoom. The main event space will not use fluorescent lighting. Face masks are requested except when this presents a language barrier or when one is performing. Please refrain from wearing any scented perfume, cologne, lotion, etc.
Getting to Experimental Station: Free street parking is available. The accessible entrance to Experimental Station is a red door on the east side of the building. The nearest bus stops are the #59 at 61st and Dorchester or the #2, #171, and #172 at 60th and Kenwood. Experimental Station is a few blocks away from the University of Chicago/59th Street Metra Station.
For any questions or requests regarding accessibility, please contact Angee Lennard, HCL’s Accessibility Coordinator, at angee@highconceptlabs.org or 312-374-1117.
Co-presented by High Concept Labs and Unfolding Disability Futures, with support from Experimental Station.