Eco-Crip: Exploring the Intersections of Disability Identity and the Environment Through Artistic Practice
Time: April 16, 2026, 5 p.m. - 8 p.m.
Location: Shaffer Galleria | Shemin Auditorium
Part of the Syracuse Symposium series.
Jointly presented by the Center on Disability and Inclusion and Syracuse University Art Museum, also featured as part of the Visiting Artists Lecture Series (VALS) in VPA, and the Ganders Lecture Series in the School of Education, artist Francisco echo Eraso offers an experimental lecture on the intersections of disabled identity and ecological crisis. Given the increasingly toxic and disabling environments across the globe, disability is simultaneously deemed “unnatural” and therefore disposable and to be eradicated.
Through an “Eco-Crip” framework, Erasos challenge the idea of disability as a pathological deficit. Looking to Disability Justice principles to challenge binaries of natural/unnatural and normal/abnormal, disability is presented as part of human diversity and as a cultural and political identity. Eraso will discuss his own art practices alongside the work of contemporary disabled artists to illuminate disability as a crucial source of wisdom and leadership for the future ahead of us.
5:00 p.m. - welcome reception
6:30 p.m. - presentation begins
Related: Eraso offers a community workshop on April 17.
About the presenters:
Francisco echo Eraso (he/él) is a Colombian-American interdisciplinary artist, educator and access worker. He uses textiles and ceramics as well as minimalist sculpture and sound art to engage topics of liberation theology, family, and revolution.
He received his MFA in Fine Arts from Rutgers University in 2025 and a BA/BFA from Parsons, The New School in Visual Studies and Fine Arts in 2018. He has been a keynote speaker at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2025), received the Wynn Newhouse Award (2024), received the LEAD award from the Kennedy center (2023) and served as the call to action speaker for the Art-Reach Conference on Arts, Culture and Disability (2023). He has been an artist-in-residence at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts SHIFT residency for arts workers (2022-2023), FABSCRAP (2022-2023), Textile Arts Center (2020-2021), 77Art (2021) and Art Beyond Sight’s Art and Disability Residency (2021). He has exhibited at Mason Gross Galleries (NJ), The Re-Institute, Tempest Gallery, The Shed, EFA Project Space, Westbeth Gallery, Chashama Space Gallery, Ford Foundation Gallery, Amos Eno Gallery, Flux Factory and Sheila C. Johnson Gallery (NY), Mead Museum and A.P.E. Gallery (MA), The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (OH), Museo Antonini in Peru, among others. He has been published by NYU Press (2025) Art in America (2022), and Ugly Duckling Press (2020).
Eraso currently works as an accessibility consultant, independent curator, youth minister, and part-time lecturer at Rutgers University, Parsons, The New School and Middlesex Community College.