Carmen Papalia image credit: Jordan Reznick
Saturday, June 1, 2013, Begins 6PM @ Grand Central Art Center
ARTIST CARMEN PAPALIA’S OWN WORDS:
Excerpt from A New Model for Access in the Museum
In my second year of college I really started to care about access—my own access in particular. It was hard not to care. I was coming to terms with a progressive vision loss that made it difficult for me to read printed text—which, at the time, I had to do quite a lot since I was an English student and a magazine editor. I remember giving myself a headache every time I struggled to focus on a poem, and, more often than not, stressing over more editing work than I could manage. I privileged my access to the visual world so much that it was bad for me.
I eventually chose to rely on the accessibility accommodations that were available to me as a full-fledged disabled person, but it soon became clear, even while accommodated, that my access was vastly different from that of my peers. Shopping for groceries with an assistant was weird. The audio description for movies sucked. I couldn’t walk into a library, select a book and start reading. I constantly felt limited by the systems that I had chose to rely on because I hadn’t yet claimed agency and established a system for my own access.
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