Disability Culture Now: A Panel with Emily Watlington & Jeff Kasper

Join Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG), critic, curator, and senior editor at Art in America, Emily Watlington, artist Jeff Kasper, and co-curators of How do you throw a brick through the window… Laurel V. McLaughlin, TUAG, and Tanya Gayer, John Michael Kohler Arts Center for a conversation engaging disability culture in our contemporary moment.  

Emily Watlington is a critic, curator, and senior editor at Art in America. Her writing focuses on disability, feminism, and those places where art and science meet. She holds a master’s degree in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT, and is the recipient of the Rabkin Prize for Arts Journalism (2024), C/O Berlin Theorist Award (2020), and the Vera List Writing Prize for Visual Arts (2018). 

Jeff Kasper is an artist, writer, and educator working in public art, design, cultural accessibility, and social engagement. He creates text-based projects, social spaces, publications, games, digital media, exhibitions, community workshops, and participatory learning projects, often in partnership with organizations. His artworks center dialogical, reflective, and instructional texts, as well as pedagogical objects that prompt meditation, relationship building, and serious play. 

Tanya Gayer is a curator and writer based in Sheboygan, WI. Her curatorial projects and research examine history-making processes embedded in archives, databases, governmental assimilation efforts, and algorithmic categorizations. Recent curatorial projects at John Michael Kohler Arts Center include: Clocking In: 2024 Arts/Industry Residents; Workplace: Justin Favela; Sunny Leerasanthanah: Naturalization; Morehshin Allahyari: ماه طلعت Moon-faced; Angela U. Drakeford: In bloom at the end of the world. 

Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD is a writer, curator, art historian, and educator, working as a Curator and the Director of the Collective Futures Fund at Tufts University Art Galleries. Her curatorial work focuses on contemporary research-based sculpture, installation, new media, and social practice works concerning formal liminalities, globalized migration, and ecological networks. McLaughlin has curated exhibitions Emilio Rojas: tracing a wound through my body; Bergman & Salinas: Against the General Good/ Contra El Bien General; Ulises: Assembly; Waste Scenes (featuring Maia Chao and Fred Schmidt-Arenales; and Mira Dayal: conjunctions, among others.  

Images: A photograph of Jeff Kasper. He smiles looking brightly into the distance as if his image was caught mid laughter. He has a tightly shaven mustache and beard. He is wearing all black except for a purple scarf around his neck. In the background are partially viewable artworks hung on studio walls and cropped to the frame of the picture. Almost legible is a soft white flag with the bold black text “have a meaningful, long lasting relationship.”  Photo of Laurel McLaughlin by Sam Gehrke. A woman with curly blonde and brown hair wearing gray glasses and a black leather jacket stands in front of brick wall bordering a blue painted wall. Photo of Tanya Gayer. A woman wearing her curly hair up in a bun smiles standing next to an orange wall with white tiles. She is wearing a white shirt with a high button-up collar and colorful cross-stich floral embroidery. Photo: Sunny Leerasanthnah. Emily Watlington. Photo Kevin J. Miyazaki. A white woman with brown curly hair and gray eyes looks at the camera. She is wearing bright orange aviator glasses and a bright orange tank top.