Nicknamed The Queen-Mother of Gnarly, Cheryl Marie Wade (1948–2013) created a body of work combining poetry, one-woman shows, and songs. Her practice emerged from women’s discussion groups before developing into performances for increasingly large audiences. Her performances were later distributed on mail-order VHS tapes when her health no longer allowed her to take the stage.
As part of a disabled artists’ scene that developed in Berkeley, California, in the late 1970s, she joined others in reclaiming the slur crip ple to form the word crip. Together, they separated disability from medical discourse and asserted it as a sensory, shared experience of the world. While working on a documentary for French television, disabled filmmaker and activist Diane Maroger met Cheryl Marie Wade, collected her poems, and made repeated trips to Berkeley in the early 2000s. This work resulted in dozens of hours of footage documenting the handix community in California, before the producer abandoned the project after failing to find a broadcaster. Twenty-five years later, this exhibition becomes an editing room where visitors can watch Cheryl Marie Wade’s performances and interviews, whose work had until now remained on the margins of the art world. This footage is brought into dialogue with works by contemporary artists who have direct or metaphorical connections to Berkeley’s crip scene. The connections that emerge serve both as sketches for possible films and as reflections on what makes certain works accessible—or inaccessible—to us.
Admission: From 0 to 13 euros.
Source: paris.fr — photo: Sylvia Calle