For the past three decades Joseph Grigely’s work as an artist, scholar, and activist, has explored the idea of access as a medium. How does access become a responsibility for everyone so that it benefits everyone, and not just those who are deemed disabled? This dossier features a selection of posts from Grigely’s Instagram account, an open journal and living archive, capturing ordinary interactions that highlight how disability problematizes the status quo, by transgressing the equanimity of social life. These moments expose the mechanics of ableism by turning what is systemically overlooked or erased into shared testimony. Grigely documents what could be forgotten, an archive of the everyday, rife with opportunities to go wrong and yet also at times, brilliantly and unexpectedly, go right.
BE NICE | FUCK YOU
2 August 2020
So which will it be today?
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STYROFOAM COFFEE CUP SCULPTURES
January 14, 2024
One perplexing issue for me is how disability gets left out of many cultural narratives related to diversity—it doesn’t quite fit into the taxonomy of canonized narratives, and is regarded as a disciplinary outlier.
Once, at a conference for the Society for Textual Scholarship in 1989, while the talks were taking place, I sat outside the auditorium at a table with the coffee pot and donuts, slowly peeling apart Styrofoam coffee cups to make a sculpture. I made two of them, actually, using a plastic knife to cut concentric rings, and a small dab of cream cheese here and there to hold loose bits together. A distinguished colleague, walking into the lecture hall asked me what was up, and why I was out in the hallway and not inside listening to the talks? I explained: there was no sign language interpreter. I had asked for one, but, well, there isn’t one, and that’s as much as I knew. It was just too humiliating to sit in the lecture hall and pretend everything was normal, when it was not—and the only way I could salvage some sense of my own being was to do something else, and did you ever notice how malleable with possibility these Styrofoam coffee cups are? Want to try? He actually sat down with me for a while and explained, from his point of view, that disability was not a subaltern category of being like race, but rather something that required an entirely different set of disciplinary tools. And what might those tools be, I asked? He shrugged and simply said: we’re not there yet.
Thirty-five years later, a lot has changed, but against a background of polarized human relations—socially, culturally, and politically—it’s hard to know where disability theory sits in the grand scheme of things. If I was making Styrofoam coffee cup sculptures at the beginning of my art and academic career, I find it revealing that they still have relevance—how disability theory has created its own symbolic space outside the mainstream conference hall, and in the lobbies beside the coffee pots and donuts.
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PARAGRAPH X
February 21, 2021
Anyone who follows me on Instagram knows I have been posting, ad nauseam, complaints about the lack of access for online arts programming—particularly talks, interviews, and panel discussions that lack live captioning. Social justice is more meaningful for everyone when it is inclusive of everyone—and the art world often forgets this.
In recent years, artists with disabilities have begun to append to their contracts access riders. These riders spell out specific access needs as a way of facilitating their access to venues and events when they are participating in programming. Samples of such riders can be found at: accessdocsforartists.com
I created Paragraph X as an extension of this basic idea, focusing on public access to arts programming. Paragraph X is an artwork in the form of legal language. It is designed to make access consciousness a regular part of everyone’s contract—the disabled and abled alike—so that those who are able-bodied play a role in making disability justice a shared responsibility.
I am asking artists, curators, critics, and other people to insert Paragraph X in their contracts with arts institutions, and to remind institutions of their responsibilities as they plan, promote, and manage public events. The text of Paragraph X is as follows: “X. All public events, both online and in-person, should be accessible to people with disabilities, and follow the national accessibility statutes of the host institution(s). Additionally, provisions for access should be clearly stated in promotional advertising for events, and the advertising should include a contact person to whom inquiries about access can be directed. When documentation of the event is posted online, this material should also be effectively accessible.”
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HOW DOES SOMEONE SEE DEAFNESS?
May 22, 2019
How does someone see deafness? How can one make visible what is, by biological design, invisible? Not just in and among the people who surround us on a daily basis, but also, by extension, culturally?
Since 1999, I have been saving, when I can find and record them, images of street signs indicating that a deaf person lives in the vicinity. Sometimes they say “Deaf Person” but usually they say “Deaf Child Area”—a cautionary warning that the child on the verge or in the street might not hear your horn when you are driving by. The signs are present in all kinds of places: in the city, in quiet suburbs, along country lanes, and even on the dirt roads of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
What I like about the signs is how they make deafness both visible and present, in a practical and meaningful way. It’s hard to do this when you are walking around, or when you are in airports or museum of other places where people congregate, and where rules regulate behavior. Once, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while sitting on the floor as I spent time with David’s Marat, a museum guard struck me on the shoulder and berated me for not getting up on my feet the first time he warned me. He had approached me from behind, and I had no idea he was yelling at me to get up. Another time, at Union Station in Washington DC, four police officers dragged me outside because I did not follow their directions to get on my feet. A “deaf person” sign on the street where you live is an affirmation that your deafness is real, and so are you.
I never had a sign on my street when I was growing up. A couple of years ago, as the traffic on my block in Chicago became increasingly busy, I asked my Alderman’s office if they could arrange to have a deaf pedestrian sign installed. It was a slow process and took a couple of reminders—but today I noticed the sign had finally been installed. I guess, at age 62, I’m a little old for a “Deaf Child Area” sign.
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HANDICAPP FARE
January 21, 2019
This is a conversation with an Amtrak ticket clerk at Union Station in Washington DC. Though the conversation took place many years ago, it remains relevant for its absurdity. What happened is this: One day I had to take a train to New York, and so the first thing I did when I arrived at the train station was purchase my ticket. This was a little more complicated than it seems, though. In America, a Federal law stipulates that disabled people are entitled to reduced fares to compensate for the hassles and added expenses that disabled people typically incur when traveling. Normally this isn’t something I’d ask for, but I thought—why not?—if only to see how much cheaper it would be. So I went up to the service counter and asked the clerk for a round trip ticket to New York at the disabled person’s rate. I showed her my transit ID card, which identified me as “a person with a disability.” She smiled and wrote out my ticket, and then she said something to me that didn’t quite make sense. So I asked her to write it down and this is what she wrote: “handicapp fare is more money.” As she further wrote, the handicap fare was $102 round trip, but the regular excursion fare was $92 round trip. It didn’t make sense then and it doesn’t make sense now. A lot of things related to disability laws don’t make sense.
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BETWEEN THE WALLS AND ME
January 2, 2025
An exhibition I made at MASS MoCA in 2023 included work made from 1996–2023, as well as two new sculptures, one titled Between the Walls and Me. Much of the exhibition is devoted to the enabling side of disability, but there is also a blunt, realistic confrontation with the disabling side of the experience. As a disabled person, you spend a lot of time advocating for yourself: you are frequently negotiating, not just for access, but also, as part of the process itself, for a basic level of dignity. Moreover, advocacy like this is not just about making accommodations requests—it’s about justifying them, facilitating them, shepherding them through what can sometimes be a very long process. Some access requests take years to process, as it took for my school to install interpreting lights in my classroom—spotlights that can be used to illuminate the sign language interpreter when a room is darkened for image projections or videos. This kind of advocacy is essentially uncompensated labor, a point I often find myself repeating. For many disabled people, it literally amounts to a second job. It’s stressful. It’s wearying. Sometimes it’s infuriating.
Between the Walls and Me is a cast stone copy of my head that was smashed into the MASS MoCA gallery wall, damaging both the wall and my head. It lies on the floor, nose, chin, and ears broken and scarred, with the detritus of the contact littering the space: the busted bits of both of us. You can’t get around the reality of this experience. A person’s disability does not exist solely in the present, as one kind of impairment or another; it is instead an individual’s entire history with that impairment, and the accumulation of trauma that never really goes away. I use the term accretive anxiety to describe this phenomenon. Accretive anxiety involves the accretion of ableist-related experiences over a period of years, or even decades, and how this is assimilated by the body and mind, and how it gets reshaped into something else—even, sometimes, if you’re lucky, art.
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ROME REPORT
June 16, 2023
In 2019 I posted about what I called “Blind Lines” in Athens—embossed sidewalk tiles designed to help blind people negotiate urban walkways. Technically they are called tactile blocks or “Tenji Blocks” and were devised by Seiichi Miyake in 1965, and installed in Okayama in 1967.
There are two principle designs: raised bumps, which indicate a warning or hazard—a road crossing for example—and what are called “directional blocks”—grooved straight lines that indicate one might proceed unimpeded in a particular direction.
As I wrote in 2019, Blind Lines sometimes do improbable things, and in Rome they do decidedly irrational things like lead people directly into dead ends: into walls, into roads, into restaurant tables set up on sidewalks—they make a mockery of Miyake’s intentions.
This is Rome in 2023: where the center of the city has become a conflation of the ruins of two empires: that of ancient Rome and that of Modernism. Rome does not feel like a functional city; the Blind Lines here have deteriorated to the point they no longer convey their intent, and trampled by both tourism and neglect they are becoming another thin layer of Rome’s archaeological sedimen.
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MARTIN WONG, “TRAFFIC SIGNS FOR THE HEARING IMPAIRED”
February 16, 2022
So—a few minutes ago an email tumbled into my inbox, with an announcement from Baruch College’s Mishkin Gallery about a walking tour they are organizing that will feature, among other works, Martin Wong’s Traffic Signs for the Hearing Impaired from 1991.
I wrote about Wong’s work in my Postcards to Sophie Calle in 1993, and how problematic the work is—being not so much a collaboration with those who are Deaf and speak ASL, but a condescending gesture of cultural appropriation done “for” the hearing impaired.
The particular problem is this: the sign mis-makes the letter “f” in the ASL alphabet. Instead of an “f” it reads like the number “6.” So instead of saying “School for Deaf” it actually says “School 6or Dea6.”
I have tried to like this project—Wong has done a lot of important work—but in the end, I can never get my head around the fact he didn’t have the work proofread by a deaf signer—which is really the least he could have done. And I’m also bothered a lot by people who share this particular work with me and say—”isn’t this great?!”—and when I point out the error seem perturbed as if I’m being ungrateful.
Really sorry, but this kind of appropriation is not something to be celebrated—it needs the same critical scrutiny we bring to the many cultural missteps that litter our past.
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DEAFNESS, PLEASE MEET BLINDNESS
BLINDNESS, PLEASE MEET DEAFNESS
May 3, 2025
One of the dilemmas of art that originates in a disability is the ways it might be bound to a specific sensory medium. Like vision. Or hearing. Or scent. Or touch. How can we make art accessible to those who don’t have the same sensory abilities? Even assuming, as I do, that accessibility means translating one medium to another, and comes with all the drawbacks that translation itself entails?
My Conversation works are primarily scraps of paper that hearing people write on when having a conversation with me. Sometimes they are just a few words on the back of an envelope; sometimes they are more extensive. Paula’s Birthday Party is one such conversation. The original conversation—on a tablecloth, at a restaurant on Spring Street in 1996, during a birthday party for the artist Paula Hayes—was initially exhibited in the exhibition “An Unrestricted View of the Mediterranean,” at Kunsthaus Zürich in 1998. In 2016, the availability of high-resolution scanners for oversize documents meant that the work could finally be scanned and printed. The original inks had faded, and the wine spills oxidized from red to brown; but through careful editing of the colors and contrast of individual lines, the work was brought back to life.
In 2024, working with Factum Arte in Madrid, we produced a 3-D relief print of the tablecloth to enable blind people to have tactile access to the print. Historically, embossed paper was used for this purpose; but 3-D printing takes this to a new level. Moreover, the goal is to transcend the usual “touch tour,” by integrating within the exhibition accessible versions of certain works so that able-bodied visitors might experience the work as disabled people do. A big thank you to my old Oxford classmate, Adam Lowe, the founder of Factum Arte, for making this new work possible.
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THE WHEELCHAIR RAMPS AT THE ENTRANCE
TO THE OLD COLLEGE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
October 26, 2019
The wheelchair ramps located at the entrance to the Old College of the University of Edinburgh are the most beautiful wheelchair ramps I have ever seen, anywhere in the world.
Old College was designed in 1789 by Robert Adam, and the buildings were built over many subsequent decades. Made primarily of sandstone, Old College currently houses the senior administration of the University of Edinburgh; the Law School; the Playfair Library Hall; and the Talbot Rice Gallery. Like many college quadrangles in the UK, the entrance from the street is separated by a series of inner staircases.
The wheelchair ramps are made from cast iron, the ramp paths embossed with a molded sunburst pattern and filigree of leaves. The lips of the ramp meet the stone flawlessly. Where a ramp intersects with a slope in a way to create a compound curve, the ramp splays where it meets the slope. What makes the ramps special is a combination of practical engineering, meaningful design, and a touch of creative embellishment. Never before have I seen a wheelchair ramp that transcended its purpose in a way that reflected care for both the buildings from which it extended and the people who might use it: a rare kind of design, to me it is a masterpiece architectural prosthesis.
I do not know who made the ramps, or when they were installed; I intend to find out. While Old College has a plaque near the entrance narrating its history, these ramps deserve a plaque of their own.
Don’t ever let anyone let you believe a wheelchair ramp cannot be beautiful.