Artist Talk: Andy Slater

Join us for an evening of curiosity, creativity, and conversation about how art can shape the way we see our environment and one another.

Hosted in partnership with Small School, an art-based, alternative education platform featuring prominent national and international visiting artists, join us for a series of stimulating and thought-provoking conversations on public art and the environment at Dix Park.

Featured Artist: Andy Slater

Talk Title: Access Denied

Artist Andy Slater has spent his career expanding what art can feel like when access isn’t an afterthought but part of the creative spark. His work challenges familiar assumptions about perception and invites audiences to consider how artists build meaning through the ways their work is shared and experienced.

In this talk, Andy will introduce his “Access Denied” approach and the ideas that shape it. He’ll share how disabled artists weave access into their practice from the very beginning, turning it into something poetic, personal, and playful. Through stories from his own studio and from fellow artists he’s worked alongside, he’ll open up a conversation about access not as a set of requirements but as an artistic force.

Join us for an evening that looks closely at the relationship between creativity, culture, and the many ways people engage with art.

Artist Bio

Andy Slater is a blind Chicago-based media artist, writer, performer, and Disability advocate whose practice reaches across sound installation, immersive audio, XR environments, music, and text. His work regularly crosses the boundaries between technology and creative expression.

He is a United States Artists fellow whose projects and perspectives have been featured by outlets such as BBC Outlook and the New York Times. His writing appears in publications including McSweeney’s, where he introduced his research on Crypto Acoustic Auditory Non-Hallucination. Carnegie Hall commissioned his sound description for Molly Joyce’s Side By Side, a project that deepened his national profile.

Teaching is another throughline in his work. Andy mentors emerging artists through programs with the Atlantic Center for the Arts’ Young SoundSeekers, Creative Users’ Sensory Shift, and the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology. He holds an MA from Northwestern University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

His current practice ranges from spatial audio to alt-text experiments for sound and image, alongside sound design work for film, dance, and even early explorations into digital scent. When he’s not in the studio, he performs with the acid-soul band Velcro Lewis Group and records solo as Calculator Font.

While free to attend, space is limited. Registration is required.

This program is free to the public thanks to Dix Park Conservancy donors.

Register at the link above.