DisTopia

Join your hosts Jill and Chris for conversation with the critically acclaimed contemporary artist Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi. Sandie is an artist, disability activist, and scholar. Her interdisciplinary practice often centers on personal histories and narratives generated within and performed by the body through everyday social interaction.

Join your hosts Chris and Jill for an intimate conversation with the artist and author Brian Catling. Catling is a novelist, poet and artist whose practice reaches across painting, sculpture, installation and performance. His surreal narratives, performances and sculptures evoke a sophisticated awareness of disability, exploring the vulnerability, grace and toughness of brokenness, alienation, healing and heroics throughout his rich and detailed multi-disciplinary practice.

Join DIStopia hosts Jill Vyn and Christopher Smit for discussion with Creative Growth Arts Center Executive Dir. Tom di Maria. As a pioneer in the worlds of Outsider and Disability Art, di Maria has changed the way we think about communities, the politics of art, and the place for different bodies and minds in the lexicon of contemporary art.

DIStopia co-hosts Jill and Chris visit Cultura Collective and chat with Stefanie Rosales, curator and Program Director for the Cook Arts Center, and local artist, Javier Torres. As you listen to these brief interviews, consider the relationship between disability and culture and how two artists, Reyna Garcia and Javier Torres, draws the viewer into conversations about their lived experience of disability.

In this episode of DIStopia's ArtPrize 9 series, Chris and Jilly discuss whether or not you have to be in Grand Rapids to get value from the ArtPrize experience. Rennick, to consider ways that ArtPrize is working to make the festival more accessible to those of us choose not to head downtown for one reason or another.

In this first episode of DIStopia's ArtPrize 9 series, DisArt co-directors Chris Smit and Jill Vyn offer reflections of the independent films It Ain't Over and Dina (pronounced "Deena") from Wednesday evening's ArtPrize on-screen event that was held at the Ladies Literary Club.

DIStopia cohosts Jill Vyn and Christopher Smit explore the complicated reactions to the recent death of Telethon Maven, Jerry Lewis. Guests include Smit's mother, former board of directors for the Chicagoland Chapter of the MDA and co-founder of Jerry's Orphans, activist Mike Ervin.

Join host Christopher Smit for an in-depth conversation with the influential Disability Artist Riva Lehrer.

Join host Christopher Smit for hilarious conversation with Stand-up Comedian Samuel Comroe who will be featured at Laugh Fest 2017 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Join host Christopher Smit for a live broadcast from Miami Beach at the world-renowned Art Basel Contemporary Art Fair. In this episode Lisa Van Arragon, DisArt Curator audio describes the gigantic beachfront tent of the Untitled Art exhibition on Ocean Drive, and Smit talks to the visual artist Claudia Hart about her unique approach to the body.