Weekly We Make: Collaborative Space Drawing
moira williams, Blood Songs + Oracles Crip Careoke Lounge 2025.
About the Weekly We Make Activity
Draw an architectural space for collaboration, inspired by the artist collaborations in All That We Need Is In This Room.
About Weekly We Make
It’s an art party! Weekly We Make at the MacKenzie Art Gallery, presented by Canada Life, is an opportunity for individuals and families to drop in and create artwork.
Learn about the artists and artworks in MacKenzie’s Permanent Collection and featured exhibitions with weekly in-person hands-on workshops that can be modified for all ages. Visit our studio to make art with Gallery Educators and guest artists, exploring new and beloved techniques and art materials.
There is no cost to attend these drop-in sessions. All materials are provided.
The Artwork Blood Songs + Oracles Crip Careoke Lounge
The Blood Songs + Oracles Crip Careoke Lounge is an installation artwork created by artist moira williams. In this room, people worked together to write karaoke songs. These songs were created online by a group of people with mixed disabilities.
The artwork invites people of all abilities to come in, sing, sign, or hum along, and enjoy karaoke together. The room’s decorations—its patterns, colors, and textures—are designed to be used and enjoyed by visitors.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
moira williams is an interdisciplinary artist, access magician, and dreamer of Lenape, Kickapoo, Wyandot, and Sämi descent. Their relational and often co-creative practice stewards spaces for and with disabled people for crip gatherings and expressions, while co-building physical, virtual, and ancestral paths to each other.
Studio Activity
Inspired by the collaborative environment in moira william’s Blood Songs + Oracles Crip Careoke Lounge use paper and a pencil to design your own collaborative creative space.
MATERIALS
- Drawing paper, cut into squares (15 cm x 15cm or bigger)
- Pencils, erasers, and sharpeners
- Markers and pencil crayons
INSTRUCTIONS
- Draw the outline of a room.
- Use a pencil to draw a large shape on your paper. The shape can be a square, a rectangle, a circle, or you can base it off of the shape of a room that you are familiar with.
- Remember to draw large! Each line represents one of the walls of the room you are designing, and the room will need space for all the collaborative activities you want to do inside.
- Add an entrance/exit.
- Use one of the walls of the room you’ve drawn as the edge of a triangle. This triangle represents a swinging door or an entrance to the space. Add another entrance to your room if you want.
- Design your ultimate collaborative work or living space. *Think about who will be enjoying the space and consider how people of all abilities will experience the room.
- Include furniture or other creative elements.
- Create a legend or add writing to help people understand your architectural drawing.
Example
THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
- How do people with different abilities use and enjoy the spaces around them?
- What does collaboration mean to you?
IMPORTANT WORDS
- Crip: is a slang word for cripple. Cripple is a word that has been used since approximately 950 AD as a slur. In the 1960’s the growing Disability Rights movement began to intentionally use the term crip as a way to reclaim, celebrate, and remove the shame society has constructed and burdened disabled people with.
- Karaoke: is when you sing along to music while the words show up on a screen.
- Crip Careoke: is moira williams’ invention that includes a creative respelling of karaoke where “kara” is replaced with “care.”
- Collaboration / collaborative: the act of working together with people or other living beings.