Join us as we welcome Dr. Patrick McKelvey for his talk, Impossible Enterprise: Ron Whyte, CETA, and the National Task Force for Disability and the Arts.
Drawing from his recent Disability Works (NYU Press, 2024), “Impossible Enterprise” focuses on the infrastructural activism of the queer disabled playwright Ron Whyte. It examines how Whyte drew on competing policy and activist developments to secure public service employment through the New York Artists Project (1978–80), the largest federally subsidized arts jobs program funded through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, or CETA (1973). This talk demonstrates how Whyte employed CETA resources to launch an activist organization of his own, the National Task Force for Disability and the Arts (NTFDA). Although this short-lived organization realized little of what it set out to accomplish, Whyte’s radical infrastructural imagination nonetheless charted new itineraries for US disability politics beyond the demands of productive citizenship.
Patrick McKelvey is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. His first book, Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation, was published by NYU Press in 2024. He has also published essays in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings. McKelvey’s research has received recognition and financial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the American Society for Theatre Research, the American Theatre and Drama Society, the Committee on LGBT History, the Schlesinger Library, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
This lecture is Zoom only. The link can be accessed using the button below.