Sick (Music) Center

In the fog of my chronic illness, I kept picturing a sick music center in my neighborhood. I pictured wandering through an archive of disabled music making. I pictured meeting people in the stacks of the library, pulling out books and zines organized by syndrome, by symptom, by instrument. I imagined meeting a musician between the sections ‘Diaphragmatic Singing For The Horizontal Singer’ and ‘Violin For Your Post Exertional Malaise’ and starting a slow band to tour theaters with beds for the audience. I imagined disabled people running a call center, dispatching musicians to play at each other’s windows on our hardest days (or even on the not so hard ones). I imagined reading the story of a sick musician making an album in a hospital that reads like a recipe.

—Anna RG

Over the course of two months, Anna RG will be transforming Recess’ Session space into an experimental research, development, and community space exploring sick/disabled listening and music—of the living, the passed on, and the speculative. Sick (Music) Center seeks to gather a growing cohort of sick/disabled musicians, to collaboratively develop alternatives to the formal and systemic structures which guide prevailing ideas about what music can be, where music can show up in our lives, and for whom music is accessible. Sick Center explores the question, how do we seek Sick Musical forms–ways of making and worlds of sound that embrace our states of being and our states of desire?

Sick, as in having illness, working with illness, as in being disabled in its infinite forms. Sick, as in living Mad, in deep grief, in addiction. Sick, as in diagnosed, undiagnosed, or self-diagnosed. Sick, as in moving with–and belonging to–community and lineage of sick and disabled cultures. Sick, as in being sick of it, or as in, if society is “well’ then I don’t want to be that.

Music, as in transmission of sound, as in connective expressive tissue, as in joining or making traditions of rhythms and storytelling and ritual, and sonic waves touching our bodyminds. Listening, as in the directing, offering, misdirecting, wandering, flying, and finding of our bodily attentions, beyond ear-hearing.

Center, as in a place to convene, as in a reversal of capitalist geometry. What if sick/disabled people/ways were centered, not discarded to the outside? What if we push further into the center of our sick and disabled desires in our sound practices, as well as in our solidarities and support?

The project's public installation, invitational study group, and development/performance space poses these questions:

• How do we embrace music as a solidarity practice?
• How do we learn from Sick Music Ancestors and carry their work forward in our making?
• How can we engage in history-finding and imagining, outside of academic institutions and formal archives? And how can our acts of finding, as artists, become an invitation to make?
• How might the stories of disabled music history be different if they were written for and by disabled people?
• What happens when we develop relationships to sickness and sound that center connection, rather than individual “healing music” or “triumph over disability” narratives which rarely depict disabled/sick people in community or connection with each other?This connection can be for raging together, for resistance, for destroying ableism, for enabling sick musicians playing to each other lullabies in bed.

The project arises out of the observation that so many disabled/sick people of the past have been left out of the musical archives. Some were institutionalized without access to music, while for others, their music was shut away, or was never passed down, or wasn’t considered music by the people around them in the first place. Some sick ancestors’ music was never recorded at all, or never entered into the record, or never circulated in capitalist systems of exchange. Perhaps their sounds vibrated in a range that couldn’t be heard by all, or was directed at a comrade, a friend, a relative, a cellmate, or simply resonated in their own body.

The project invites the public to counteract the dominance of storytelling about disabled or sick musicians by able-bodied people (and often for able-bodied audiences). Furthermore, the artist hopes for Sick Center to be a site for storytelling for sick musicians to share the details of their processes, supporting each other in figuring out how to move through the confusing struggle of making work in and through illness.

Thursday - Saturday, 12-5pm

Except Nov 27–29, and Dec 25, 2025-Jan 2, 2026 when Recess is closed for the holidays.

Either the artist or Recess staff will be available to view the project in process.

Access Notes :

• Air purifiers will be present, and the Sick Center asks all guests to mask. For those who cannot mask due to an access need, we will make rapid covid tests available for you to take prior to entry. Thank you for practicing safety with us!

• All public program space at 46 Washington Avenue is fully accessible for wheelchair users. Our restrooms are gender neutral and ADA compliant.

• For programs in our spaces, we will do our best to accommodate requests for ASL interpretation or captioning. If you have specific access questions or needs please email info@recessart.org with as much advance notice as possible.

Sundays, Nov 23 - Dec 17, 2-4pm, Application Required The group meets over four consecutive Sundays at Recess and online (fully hybrid). The artist is assembling a small peer cohort of disabled/sick musicians to unpack, gather, investigate, and imagine works of sick/disabled music. These include actual documented historical case studies, as well as “critical fabulations,” a concept elaborated by Saidiya Hartman that uses historical archives, critical theory, and literary methods to give voice to the silenced, forgotten, and exploited individuals whose stories are lost or misrepresented in official records. Working from our study, we’ll experiment with ideas of access-thinking, process, improvisation, composing and form. Leroy Moore of Krip-Hop Nation will be our guest speaker!

This project has been made with support from many, including Artists In Resistance NYC, Cripple Punk Magazine, Culture Push, Alexa Dexa, Anna Wituk, Dave Ruder.