Patty is a Co-Founder, Executive and Artistic Director of Sins Invalid (www.sinsinvalid.org), a disability justice-based performance project centralizing disabled artists of color and queer and gender non-conforming artists with disabilities.
“OUR MISSION
Sins Invalid is a disability justice based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized. Led by disabled people of color, Sins Invalid’s performance work explores the themes of sexuality, embodiment and the disabled body, developing provocative work where paradigms of “normal” and “sexy” are challenged, offering instead a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all bodies and communities.
We define disability broadly to include people with physical impairments, people who belong to a sensory minority, people with emotional disabilities, people with cognitive challenges, and those with chronic/severe illness. We understand the experience of disability to occur within any and all walks of life, with deeply felt connections to all communities impacted by the medicalization of their bodies, including trans, gender variant and intersex people, and others whose bodies do not conform to our culture(s)' notions of "normal" or "functional."
OUR VISION
Sins Invalid recognizes that we will be liberated as whole beings—as disabled, as queer, as brown, as black, as gender non-conforming, as trans, as women, as men, as non-binary gendered— we are far greater whole than partitioned. We recognize that our allies emerge from many communities and that demographic identity alone does not determine one's commitment to liberation.
Sins Invalid is committed to social and economic justice for all people with disabilities – in lockdowns, in shelters, on the streets, visibly disabled, invisibly disabled, sensory minority, environmentally injured, psychiatric survivors – moving beyond individual legal rights to collective human rights.
Our stories, imbedded in analysis, offer paths from identity politics to unity amongst all oppressed people, laying a foundation for a collective claim of liberation and beauty.”
That information is from the website.
Why I wanted to add this photo from the Access Centered Movement Instagram page (linked in the photo below) is to showcase that there are organizations supporting the arts of people with disabilities that have the same value of promoting that a limitation can be a source of creativity and can create an entire community to support and work through the injustice people with disabilities face through art, not just through hip hop dance. Also performances of poetry, video, spoken word, music, drama, and dance.
