“Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying” (2016–2020) was a peripatetic series of exhibitions and community projects addressing the politics of health, disability, race, and care, curated by Taraneh Fazeli. Six galleries, twenty artists, and over forty partner organizations participated. The curatorial methodology was rooted in the trajectory from rights to justice frameworks, and employed the attendant representational strategies of opacity and occlusion: beyond the main exhibitions, which provided general access points and visibility, many in-depth activities intentionally occurred outside of the public eye. Research for an accessibility field guide for use in arts and culture is underway, which, in line with these methods, shares learnings from this project and its ongoing network.

This research foregrounds ableism’s intersections with racism and colonialism, drawing on healing and disability justice frameworks, Black and Indigenous movements for reparations and abolition, and queer kinship and immigrant community care practices. The resulting book will ultimately provide tools, case studies, and essays that address the overlapping issues that occur when ableist modern-colonial institutions attempt to “include” disabled, racialized, and/or Indigenous bodyminds, without fundamentally addressing their existing structures. Private roundtables, interviews, and group exchanges with the project’s artists, organizers, and community partners will compare the largely institutionally-focused access practices in mainstream arts with models of access in community, from much-cited Bay Area disability justice models to practices tied to culture in majority-Black under-resourced cities like Waawiiyaatanong/Detroit. This polyvocal scholarship, co-created in invested community is especially essential amid a “turn” to access and the increasing “thematization” of disability and race in the arts. One example of this co-created research is a study program for BIPOC disabled Detroiters organized by disability and healing justice creative collective Relentless Bodies as they co-edit a section of the book.