Poster Design by Sonya Sombreuil, with poem by Elaine Kahn
Sonya Sombreuil is an LA-based painter and runs the label COME TEES. Elaine Kahn is the author of Romance or The End (Soft Skull, 2020) and Women in Public (City Lights, 2015). She teaches at the Poetry Field School.
[Image Description: A red and black graphic poster on a black background. Within the poster, figures and shapes drawn in bright crimson dazzle against a black background, in linework ranging from murky smudges to precise scratches to thick gestural strokes. In the center, a child with large eyes and a snub nose appears in profile, holding up a skull whose empty orbits stare intently back at its fleshy foil. Above this scene, symbols and objects are layered in a surreal synthesis. They include two long lashed-eyes, a sun with waving rays, a hand with its palm out and fingers spread commandingly, a large “X”, and small doll or effigy with dark eyes and rounded limbs. Red cracks appear throughout the entire composition, some thin, some wide and gaping. An arm appears to reach out from between the boy and the skull, grasping the ground in the bottom center of the image; small white smudges denote fingernails. Next to this, a humanoid, breasted cat appears to fly upwards in an anime-pose, one leg bent forward at the knee and arms thrown behind its body. It looks back over its shoulder, eyes gleaming with touches of white. Red flames erupt from the right margin behind the cat and trail up behind the head of the boy. At the top and bottom of this red and black scene, white pixelated text proclaims: [white] “ROMANCE WHEN I TELL MYSELF A STORY I DECIDE THE END”.]
Sick in Quarters (SiQ) is a network of disabled and chronically ill artists and activists, connected to each other and working in collaboration through the internet. Because of our own struggles with self-advocacy, we recognize a need for information that has not been easily shared within our own histories of navigating illness inside bureaucratic systems. Through curating a library of knowledge based on lived experience, in addition to community-building workshops, we seek to empower our comrades and peers with a greater sense of agency while navigating the path of their own care and treatment.
Historically, disability has been the exclusive domain of the biological, social, and cognitive arenas that shape practice in education, rehabilitative medicine, and social work. But people with disabilities never seem to be included in the normative order of things.
There remains much to be learned about understanding disability as part of the larger human experience. Policies and practices that have a direct impact on the material reality of living with disability are rarely examined by society. People with disabilities know that the fundamental issue is not one of an individual’s inabilities or limitations, but rather a hostile unadaptive society.
Sick in Quarters prioritizes the perspectives and voices of intersectionally-marginalized disabled, chronically ill, mentally ill, and neurodivergent people to make navigating disability less solitary, less daunting, and a more informed endeavor — where individuals can feel empowered and supported by community.