Cheryl Marie Wade, reine-mère des noueux - LUCIE CAMOUS & ÉTIENNE CHOSSON

Nicknamed The Queen-Mother of Gnarly, Cheryl Marie Wade (1948–2013) created a body of work that blends poems, one-woman shows, and songs. Her practice emerged in women’s support groups before evolving into performances in front of increasingly large audiences. When her health no longer allowed her to appear on stage, her performances were distributed on VHS tapes sold by mail order.

Within a disabled artists’ scene that developed in Berkeley, California, in the late 1970s, she and others reclaimed the slur “cripple” to form the word crip. Together, they detached disability from medical discourse and affirmed it as a shared, sensorial experience of the world.

As part of a documentary intended for French television, director and disability activist Diane Maroger met Cheryl Marie Wade, gathered her poems, and made multiple trips to Berkeley in the early 2000s. That work resulted in dozens of hours of film documenting the handix community in California, before the project was abandoned by the producer for lack of a broadcaster.

Twenty-five years later, this exhibition becomes an editing room for viewing Cheryl Marie Wade’s performances and interviews—works that had until then remained at the margins of the art world. These images are set in relation to works by contemporary artists who have direct or metaphorical ties to the Berkeley crip scene. The juxtapositions that emerge serve both as sketches of possible films and as reflections on what makes certain works accessible—or inaccessible—to us.