Jessica A. Cooley

Crip Materiality: Disability, Plasticity, and the Art Institution after the Americans with Disabilities Act

“Crip Materiality: Disability, Plasticity, and the Art Institution after the Americans with Disabilities Act” builds on the foundation laid by scholars of disability studies and art history to intervene in the narratives of the lives of artists and critiques modes of representation. Crip Materiality seeks to extend that critical questioning of silences and absences to address the unseen ableism in the discursive spaces between bodies, objects, and institutions, that is to the very care and conceptualization of material objects themselves.

Jessica A. Cooley is a scholar-curator working at the intersections of curatorial and museum studies, art of the United States, new materialism, and disability studies. Currently, Cooley is a Ph.D. candidate in the art history department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she is working on her dissertation, Crip Materiality: Disability, Plasticity, and the Art Institution after the Americans with Disabilities Act. Before Madison, she completed her Master’s degree in art history at Temple University and from 2006 to 2010 Cooley served as the Assistant Curator for Davidson College’s Van Every/Smith Galleries where she curated a number of exhibitions including RE/FORMATIONS: Disability, Women, and Sculpture and STARING.