Impossible Enterprise: Ron Whyte, CETA, and the National Task Force for Disability and the Arts

THEATER AND PERFORMANCE

SPEAKER: Patrick McKelvey, Notre Dame

Drawing from his recent Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation (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.