EMILY BARKER
UG COUNCIL LECTURE
May 20, 2020, 6:00 pm

Emily Barker is a designer, artist, writer and disability advocate. Their solo exhibition called Built to Scale at Murmurs Gallery in Downtown Los Angeles was featured in Cultured, CurateLA, Flaunt, Autre, Art Viewer, among many others. They attended The School of the Art Institute where they spent most of their time in the Advanced Painting department. They are however not proud of going to a school, like most, who despite preaching inclusion and diversity seem to always choose to uphold ableism, discriminatory faculty, and inaccessibility denying the human right of access to people with mobility devices and accommodations to people with chronic illness. Due to how wheelchair inaccessible housing, artist residencies and galleries are Barkers most recent project Moving Parts is converting a used RV to be a multifunctional space accessible for mobility device users. Inaccessibility is violence and all public space should accommodate everyone’s needs. They believe inaccessibility is a design problem and look forward to creating a world that does not only cater to the able bodied.