Art/Access Lab: Know Your Rights
Presented in Partnership with Access Living & Cuerpos Justificados
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
Event ends at 4:00pm
Guest Presenter:
Chris Ramos, Community Development Organizer, Latinx and Immigration, Access Living
Guest Artists:
William Estrada
Genevieve Ramos
Online Facilitator:
Terri Lynne Hudson
How can we know—and claim—our rights related to disability, immigration, free speech? How can we use our creative practice to navigate, share, and defend these rights?
This community gathering invites artists with disabilities and allies to learn about our rights and use art to help defend these rights for ourselves and others.
Blending practical information with artistic activities, this interactive event aims to build solidarity and create resources to share with neighbors, friends, and colleagues.
Chris Ramos of Access Living will guide us through our rights, offering special attention to the intersection of disability rights and immigration rights, and how these rights apply to disabled immigrants who encounter immigration officials. Then we’ll invite attendees to create mini-zines for community distribution, contribute to a collaborative artwork, and to screenprint and embellish protest posters.
Virtual participants can contribute to a digital zine via Canva or join a breakout room to discuss and share accessible mutual aid efforts and resources.
Through these activities, we strengthen our ability to protect ourselves, support our community, and participate in collective resistance.
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.
Advanced registration is required in order to receive the zoom link.
Meet Our Guest Partners
Access Living is a disability service and advocacy organization based in Chicago. Since 1980, our organization has been challenging disability stereotypes, protecting civil rights, and championing social reforms to create an accessible and inclusive society for disabled people to live self-directed lives of their choosing. We offer vital services and supports for Chicagoans with disabilities, as well as consulting services to companies and nonprofits to help make their business practices more inclusive. We are a Center for Independent Living, and the majority of our staff and board are people with disabilities.
Cuerpos Justificados (CJ), which translates to "Justified Bodies", is a disability-lead grassroots artist collective featuring intentional, innovative, and boundary-defying disability works that make political statements. CJ also integrates community participation and collaboration. Mixed ability organizing, love, vulnerability, and nonhierarchical decision-making from a crip-POC-feminist lense lays the groundwork for our collective and future exhibitions. We value cripistemology* as an essential part of art making and acknowledge that disability culture development and remembrance is a continuous process and collective effort.
*Cripistemology is an approach that centers disabled ways of knowing and being in the world.
Meet our Guest Presenters
William Estrada is currently the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art Education and an Assistant Professor at UIC School of Art & Art History, and was a teaching artist at Telpochalli Elementary School for 23 years. Estrada's approach to both art and teaching is centered on collaborative discourse. His roles as a teacher, artist, and cultural worker are intertwined. He draws on academic literature, educational settings, and personal interactions to report, record, reveal, and amplify lived experiences, aiming to foster radical imagination.
Estrada's current research focuses on developing community-based, culturally relevant projects that critically examine power structures related to race, the economy, and cultural access in contested spaces. He aspires to envision and work toward a more equitable collective future through intentional, sustained collaborations with individuals in their communities.
Chris Ramos is the Latinx and Immigration Community Development Organizer at Access Living. He leads Cambiando Vidas (CV), a group of Latinx immigrants with disabilities in organizing and advocating for systemic change. Chris brings extensive community organizing and leadership training from Access Living, Alianza Americas and the Chicago Community Learning Partnership. Growing up in Chicago as the son of Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants, they witnessed the intersecting challenges of war trauma, undocumented status, displacement and disability. These experiences fuel their commitment to advocacy, coalition-building, and grassroots action, working toward a future where immigrants with disabilities are empowered to lead lasting change.
Genevieve Ramos (she/her/ella) is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist and cultural worker. Her work challenges dominant narratives around disability, identity, and care, offering instead a vision rooted in joy, resistance, and collective healing.
Working primarily in portraiture and mixed media, Ramos uplifts the stories of disabled, queer, and BIPOC communities with bold, emotionally grounded visual language. Her practice is shaped by lived experience and an unwavering commitment to disability justice. Ramos is known for creating space for difficult conversations about disability, identity, and belonging, both through her visual work and her facilitation skills. She is a co-founder of Cuerpos Justificados, a disability-led artist collective reclaiming space through justice, art, and culture.
Ramos holds a BA in Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies from Northeastern Illinois University and a Painting Certificate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has received fellowships and awards from 3Arts/Bodies of Work, the Good Hart Artist Residency, and the Renny Golden Award for Leadership in Activism. Through her art, collective organizing, and public dialogue, Ramos continues to expand possibilities for access, visibility, and leadership in the cultural field.
Meet our Online Facilitator
Terri Lynne Hudson is a disabled, chronically ill queer actor and multidisciplinary artist and disability rights advocate living and working in Chicago. She has a BA in General Studies in the Humanities concentrating in theatre, film and dramatic literature, from University of Chicago. She has studied at Second City, Vagabond School of the Arts and Acting Studio Chicago. She has performance credits with, among others, Citadel Theatre, Strawdog Theatre Company, Accidental Shakespeare Company and Wildclaw Theatre. She is a Fall 2024 3Arts/Bodies of Work fellow. She recently performed as part of the SHIFT video installation, led by Barak Ade Soleil, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Her voice can also be found reading creepy stories on Audible and on the Random Acts Scary Stories Around the Fire and the Chilling Tales for Dark Nights podcasts.
Access Information
This event is intended to be relaxed, welcoming and comfortable 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 captions 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.
For questions or requests regarding accessibility, please contact Angee Lennard, HCL’s Accessibility Coordinator, at angee@highconceptlabs.org or 312-374-1117.
Art/Access Lab Program Team
Aquil Chartlon
Sydney Erlikh
Terri Lynne Hudson
Angee Lennard
Co-presented by High Concept Labs and Unfolding Disability Futures with support from Experimental Station and Access Living.