Cripping the Galleries: Painting Workshop featuring Genevive Ramos

Cripping the Galleries: Painting Workshop featuring Genevieve Ramos
Saturday, October 10th
1:00 pm – 3:00 pm

WHAT TO EXPECT

Join artist and disability activist Genevieve Ramos and members of Cuerpos Colectivos for an activity that reimagines the collaborative writing and drawing practice Exquisite Corpse from a disability-justice perspective in celebration of Día de Muertos. Through collaborative painting and conversation, participants will explore memory, connection, interdependence, and ways of understanding difference through a precolonial lens.

This activity is inspired by the National Museum of Mexican Art’s exhibition Where Memory Lives: 40 Years of Día de Muertos and Feminist Crip Paint Power, a multi-year project exploring love, care, and interdependency within disability communities through the frameworks of disability justice and feminism.

Access doulas—people trained to creatively support a range of access needs—will be available throughout the workshop to help participants engage in ways that work best for them.

ABOUT THE SERIES

Crip as a noun is pejorative, reclaimed by disabled people who embrace it as an outsider identity with an edge. To crip or cripping as a verb means to expose oppressive systems of normalcy and to imagine a world otherwise.

Cripping the Galleries is a collaborative series between the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), the National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA), and Bodies of Work featuring local artists activating museums through the lens of crip* culture and access.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Genevieve Ramos (b.1990) is a Mexican-American queer painter, disability advocate, and cultural worker based in Chicago. Her vibrant paintings explore the intersections of feminism, disability justice, and identity, using bold color, figures, and symbolic imagery to tell stories of resilience and love that move us toward collective liberation.

Ramos’s work draws from her lived experience as a disabled artist and survivor, transforming personal narrative into collective empowerment. Through series like Feminist Crip Paint Power and Sustaining Spirit, she reimagines the body as both vulnerable and powerful, rooted in community, memory, and transformation. Her body of work envisions collective care, guided by her cripistemology, toward an intersectional, collective liberation for all.