Explore color, figure, and empowerment in community with other makers. Artist Genevieve Ramos leads an afternoon of painting and reflection through a crip feminist lens.

This painting activity takes inspiration from the Art Institute collection and Ramos’s series, Feminist Crip Paint Power, a multi-year project exploring the love, care, and interdependency in disability communities through the lens of disability justice and feminism.

Access doulas—people who are trained to creatively support a range of access needs—will be onsite throughout the workshop to assist participants.

All are welcome.
what to expect

The workshop will take place in the Ryan Learning Center, Studio A. Enter at the Modern Wing public entrance on Monroe Street and the Ryan Learning Center will be on your left. The Ryan Learning Center is free for all, every day we’re open, but a ticket is needed to enter the museum galleries. Art-making supplies, including paint, will be provided. Staff as well as access doulas will be on hand for support.
about the artist

Genevieve Ramos (b.1990) is a Mexican-American queer painter, disability advocate, and cultural worker based in Chicago. Her vibrant paintings explore the intersections of feminism, disability justice, and identity, using bold color, figures, and symbolic imagery to tell stories of resilience and love that move us toward collective liberation.

Ramos’s work draws from her lived experience as a disabled artist and survivor, transforming personal narrative into collective empowerment. Through series like Feminist Crip Paint Power and Sustaining Spirit, she reimagines the body as both vulnerable and powerful—rooted in community, memory, and transformation. Her body of work collectively envisions our collective care, guided by her cripistemology, towards which she imagines an intersectional, collective liberation for all.
about the series

Crip as a noun is pejorative, reclaimed by disabled people who embrace it as an outsider identity with an edge. To crip or cripping as a verb means to expose oppressive systems of normalcy and to imagine a world otherwise.

Cripping the Galleries is a collaborative series between the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), the National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA), and Bodies of Work featuring local artists activating museums through the lens of crip* culture and access.

This summer, artist and educator Genevieve Ramos is leading interactive workshops at our three institutions. Additional programs will be held at the National Museum of Mexican Art on July 25 and at the MCA Chicago on August 29.
about our partners

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) is one of the world’s largest museums dedicated to contemporary art. At the MCA the public can experience the work and ideas of living artists and understand the historical, social, and cultural context of the art of our time.

The National Museum of Mexican Art stimulates knowledge and appreciation of Mexican art and culture from both sides of the border through a significant permanent collection of Mexican art, rich visual and performing arts programs, high quality arts education programs and resources, and the professional development of Mexican artists.

Bodies of Work is a consortium of four programs at three Chicago organizations that share a commitment to programming that is distinguished by its integration of disability artistry, academics, and activism:

Program on Disability Art, Culture, and Humanities and the Disability Cultural Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago

Disability Culture Activism Lab at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Art and Culture Project at Access Living

Along with partnering artists and organizations, Bodies of Work serves as a catalyst for the development of disability art and culture that illuminates the disability experience in new and unexpected ways.

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Tags: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Cripping the Galleries: Feminist Crip Paint Power, Genevieve Ramos