Jeff Kasper
BioLog

Let’s Keep in Touch
CUE Art Foundation and Queens Museum as part of Access/Points series 
Fall 2017

Access/Ponts was supported by CUE Art Foundation, Social Practice Queens (SPQ), Queens Museum, More Art, and School of Visual Arts
Let’s Keep in Touch (LKiT) is a multifaceted collaborative project which investigates tactility in the context of art via community and youth centered dialogue, embodied learning, and the development of new critical practices and methodologies. Created by Carmen Papalia and Whitney Mashburn in 2016, the project aims to set a precedent for tactile engagement and haptic criticism to become viable practices within contemporary art.

Together with youth, the artists considered non-visual and embodied approaches to learning. The group investigated a collection of objects for tactile taxonomy and vocabulary while employing the critical methodology that Georgina Kleege, Lecturer in English at the University of California at Berkeley and author of “Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller” (2006) and “Sight Unseen” (1999) describes in her writings on tactility and museology.

This project was part of Access/Points: Approaches to Disability Arts a series of conversations, workshops, and artist projects that I organized to explore disability as the crux of radical inclusion and access in the arts and beyond. The series investigates the ways that artists, cultural producers, and institutions are redefining disability and accessibility in contemporary art by destabilizing our notions of neutral public spaces and arts organizations, and moving towards inclusive body politics and social infrastructures.