Photo by Lawrence Sumulong. On a large stage, a white femme DJ is at work organizing the sounds being sent to silent disco headphones. Next to them, a scruffy white artist wearing chunky neon green heels is typing creative captions to a screen nearby. The captions say, The song has another iconic femme vocal telling us we are superstars.

Supporting New York’s Deaf and Disabled Artists

February 5, 2025

Since Artist-Organizer Kevin Gotkin joined CRNY in 2022, they have been working on a range of projects that help us understand and support the lives and livelihoods of Deaf and disabled artists. Kevin’s background in research and cultural organizing helped them identify initiatives that match what artists and organizations need in our rapidly evolving contexts. The projects span CRNY’s program areas to offer data, programming, and documentation to advance the vibrant fields of Deaf and disability artistry.

Artist employment and guaranteed income, two ways CRNY reached individual artists across the State, hold tremendous potential to transform artists’ lives. But a persistent lack of access and difficulties with public benefit programs can leave some artists with more trepidation and fewer resources unless programs use Deaf- and disability-centric strategies.

The projects below offer new insights, tools, and techniques for how funders, advocates, artists, and organizations can move toward care that all artists need.

For more on CRNY’s evaluation work, see the “Research” section of this site.

Research: Deaf and Disabled Artist Employment

The cover of a report features rounded shapes that blend into the white background, like tests of spray paint in warm reds and oranges to cooler blues and purples. Text says, Deaf and disabled artist employment. Research on work from Creatives Rebuild New York.

Design by Yo-Yo Lin

How does employment support the lives and careers of Deaf and disabled artists in New York State?

This document offers context, data, and analysis about artists’ lives and careers in the CRNY Artist Employment Program (2022 – 2024).

This report seeks to:

Identify and reflect on the contexts for Deaf and disabled artists’ employment
Share knowledge about the unique experiences of Deaf and disabled artists in CRNY’s Artist Employment cohort
Highlight the successes and challenges of the program
Inform those seeking to design new employment programs

It is written for artists, employers, funders, policy-makers, and arts workers/administrators, especially those who are creating, sustaining, and/or evaluating artist employment programs.

Download the Deaf and Disabled Artist Employment report.

Advocacy: Disability, Public Benefits, and Guaranteed Income

The cover of another report called Crip Coin. Disability, Public Benefits, and Guaranteed Income. The background has several dollar bills of different sizes. But the bills are abstract, recognizable from their green hues. Each one is transforming into something else. The edges that are usually straight are warped, like the bill is escaping itself.

Design by Kevin Gotkin

The U.S. movement for guaranteed income (GI) is growing. As more people experience the transformative potential of no-strings-attached cash assistance, we can better understand the limits of existing anti-poverty initiatives and how unrestricted aid can help fill the gaps. One question keeps surfacing among advocates, organizers, and program administrators: How does cash interact with public benefit programs? This is especially important for disabled people who use means-tested cash assistance, like the federal Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, as their primary source of support. People who use public benefits are experts about cash, but they are often left out of the design, implementation, and research about guaranteed income programs.

This report lays out some of the relationships between disability, public benefits, and cash. It offers ideas for future movement work that harnesses the critical insights of disability organizing. We draw on lessons from the CRNY Guaranteed Income for Artists program (2022 – 2024) and a convening of advocates from across the U.S. (July 2024). In the end, this document offers the notion of a ‘crip coin’ as an essential currency for the future of the cash movement.

This report seeks to:

Collate and advance existing work on this topic
Contextualize the contemporary cash movement with public benefits as a key backdrop
Explain the importance of protecting access to public benefits
Advocate for the role of disability organizing to the cash movement
Identify existing and emergent tools for protecting access to public benefit programs
Recommend pathways for future cross-movement work in GI and disability organizing

This document is written for disabled organizers and advocates, cash movement organizers, administrators, and researchers.

Download the Crip Coin: Disability, Public Benefits, and Guaranteed Income report.

ACTION: Plain Language for Arts Organizations

A third document is called Plain language for arts organizations. A guide from Creatives Rebuild New York. There is a world of swirling blue and white vectors, an abstract chaos. Cut out, through what could be an escape hatch, is blank, clear, white space where the title information is.

Design by Kevin Gotkin

Plain language is a style of writing that uses shorter words and sentences. This helps people understand the main ideas more clearly. Plain language gets written between a 6th and 8th grade reading. Plain language can help people who have trouble reading.

This guide was written by Reid Caplan, Kevin Gotkin, and Isaiah Madison. It will teach you how to write in plain language. Plain language is a way to make writing easier to understand. This guide is for people who work at arts organizations. You might be:

Someone who runs an organization that shows works of art
A volunteer at a place for artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities
The person who updates the website or social media accounts of an arts organization
An art teacher

Download the Plain Language for Arts Organizations: A Guide resource.

Program Series: Access Access

A graphic has a blue background with faint gridlines that look like the canvas for a technical drawing and the words ACCESS ACCESS in the middle. One ACCESS is a dotted outline, the other is in large all-caps, solid white text with arrows flanking some of the letters suggesting future edits or movement.

Design by Kevin Gotkin

This series about access design and disability artistry took place in the summer of 2023. The title, “Access Access,” means a few things. It means making information about accessibility more accessible. It also sounds like a direct action chant, an urgent request. Access Access could also mean that “access” is a topic we talk about. But at the same time, “access” is something we do together so that we have what we need.

Visit the “Access Access” program series here.

Header photo by Lawrence Sumulong. On a large stage, a white femme DJ is at work organizing the sounds being sent to silent disco headphones. Next to them, a scruffy white artist wearing chunky neon green heels is typing creative captions to a screen nearby. The captions say, The song has another iconic femme vocal telling us we are superstars.