ABSTRACT
Artists are increasingly invited to create accessible spaces through artworks and related programs, but they find an inadequate budget or infrastructure, which often requires uncompensated labor. Approaching disability as a theme can instrumentalize an artist's identity, and after the circumscribed invitation ends, the arts organization ceases support of accessibility. In Care Work, activist, writer, and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha reflects on how to cultivate collective revolutionary dreaming toward future thriving and present resilience. Creating accessible cultural institutions and programs is not only an artistic, educational, and visitor services problem but also a curatorial and leadership issue. If institutions recognized autonomy as a myth, they would see that those who can't afford that myth due to disability or other processes of exclusion, intimately understand the beauty of needing one another to know, see, move, and feel.
