Q&A with Francisco echo Eraso, arts and access consultant.
How did you get involved in accessibility work?
I’m a disabled, trans, Colombian American artist, curator, arts administrator, and access consultant. I started my organizing work at the now disbanded Third Root Community Health Center in Brooklyn, where I learned how to approach accessibility in a grassroots context. I moved on to larger institutions such as the Ford Foundation, where I worked on a Disability Futures Fellowship. That experience, developing programs with 20 leaders of various disability arts and justice movements, is central to how I now understand contemporary access in the arts.
What are access services?
Institutions often approach access issues through the framework of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Many art spaces are working to meet a checklist of services now required by law, whether affecting exhibition design or programs for disabled workers. Recently, there has also been a lot of recommitment to diversity, equity, access, and inclusion (DEAI), but all these efforts can still leave out many types of access that disability justice organizers foreground.
My own communities of disabled people concentrate on making space for being together. That includes access services like tours designed to meet specific disability needs, access work, care work, event coordinating, public programs, and virtual spaces. Access work should be locally centered, but also very expansive, community engaged, and led by disabled people.
What does your role entail?
Access work in the arts incorporates services such as consulting with installation teams and graphic designers to develop a universal exhibition design, which often includes tours in ASL for those who are Deaf and hard of hearing, and visual descriptions for those who are blind or have low vision.
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