Angels Have Been Sent to Me
Sponsored by Creative Time, New York, NY 1991
One month interactive art event about aging and disability to increase disability and environmental accessibility awareness, including site visits to 11 schools, museums and community centers. Able-bodied audiences invited to use artistically transformed wheelchairs, crutches and blindfolds. They could simultaneously listen to bilingual audiotapes about Allynʼs immigrant, wheelchair-bound grandmother and her cronies, within a sound composition of hospital noises and interviews by composer Helen Thorington. Allyn collected oral histories from community members living in Goldwater Hospital, a critical care home where her grandmother lived until her death at 91 years.
Time was essential to the unfolding of the experience as audience members physically engaged with the elements that comprised a conceptual, performative artwork.
Photo credit Cheri Gaulke and Henry Street Settlement staff