In Conversation: Finnegan Shannon and Ignacio G. Galán

Join a conversation between Finnegan Shannon and Ignacio G. Galán. Shannon is one of UIC Gallery 400’s current exhibiting artists in their fall exhibition Don’t mind if I do and I wish gays hung out at places where we can sit down. Galán is featured in the Chicago Architecture Biennial, showcasing their installation titled Fragments of Disability Fictions. Both artists are reimagining traditional systems and thinking about how art, architecture, and design can serve to redistribute power and provide increased access for people with disabilities. The conversation will be moderated by Dr. Bess Williamson, Associate Professor of Design Studies at North Carolina State University. Listen and learn from these inspiring creatives as they engage with each other and discuss the commonalities in their work.

Finnegan Shannon is an artist experimenting with forms of access. They are especially interested in access that intervenes in ableist structures with humor, earnestness, and rage. Their hobbies include making snack platters and looking at the sky. Some of their recent work includes Alt Text as Poetry, a collaboration with Bojana Coklyat that explores the expressive potential of image description; Do You Want Us Here or Not, a series of benches and cushions designed for exhibition spaces; and Don’t mind if I do, a conveyor-belt-centered exhibition that prioritizes rest and play.

Ignacio G. Galán is a New York-based architect, historian, and curator. His work explores and intervenes in the entanglements of architecture, politics, and the making of society, with attention to questions of residence, citizenship, belonging, and kinship. These interests manifest in design projects as much as in diverse scholarly and curatorial endeavors concerning nationalism, colonialism, migration, and disability cultures. His work operates across media and is continuously informed by different collaborations.

Dr. Bess Williamson is Associate Professor of Design Studies at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on inequities in design, particularly the history of disability access and lack of access in modern architecture and industrial design. Her book Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design (NYU Press, 2019) was one of the first to document the historical development of accessible design in the United States from 1945 to today. She is also co-editor, with Elizabeth Guffey, of Making Disability Modern: Design Histories (Bloomsbury, 2020). She is now at work on a history of neurodivergent access and the design workers who contributed to sensory and tactile environments of the late 20th/early 21st centuries.