Screening & Conversation: Alexis Kyle Mitchell’s The Treasury of Human Inheritance

On Sunday, November 9, from 3 to 5pm, JOAN will host a screening of The Treasury of Human Inheritance followed by a conversation with the artist, JOAN Director and project curator Suzy Halajian, and Amanda Cachia, crip art historian and curator in the School of Art at Arizona State University. Together, they will discuss the intersections of disability, embodiment, and representation in Mitchell’s work, situating the project within broader conversations on care, resistance, and the politics of the body.

The Goal of Our Health, opening November 7, from 6 to 9pm and on view through January 31, marks the Los Angeles premiere of Alexis Kyle Mitchell’s feature-length 16mm film The Treasury of Human Inheritance (2024), presented alongside new commissions that expand the project’s inquiry into how ideals of health, movement, and ability shape our social and scientific imaginaries. Mitchell’s works—spanning film, sculptural and archival elements, and textiles—draw bodies, histories, and social systems into tactile, immersive explorations. Her practice brings together themes of disability, memory, and kinship, translating lived experience into forms that invite reflection through sensory and embodied engagement.

Through analog processes and hand-developed materials, Mitchell transforms personal and collective histories into a tactile cinematic form that collapses the boundaries between image, flesh, and matter. Drawing from her family’s experience with Myotonic Dystrophy, she reframes illness and degeneration as sites of knowledge, memory, and relation. Within JOAN’s installation, the body becomes both subject and medium—its traces visible in film emulsions processed with urine, blood, and coffee. The Goal of Our Health examines how narratives of care and endurance persist within systems that define and delimit the body, envisioning a more collective and relational approach to health.

Additional public programs and collaborations related to The Goal of Our Health will be announced soon.

Alexis Kyle Mitchell is an artist whose work critically engages with feminist and disability studies, exploring how embodied knowledge challenges dominant narratives around health and identity. Exhibitions include Peer Gallery, London; Glasgow International, Glasgow; GTA24 MOCA Triennial, Toronto; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Kunstverein Munich; and Mercer Union, Toronto; screenings at International Film Festival Rotterdam; Art of the Real, New York; and IndieLisboa International Film Festival, Lisbon; performances at MOCA Toronto; University of Toronto and the New School, New York. Residencies include Cove Park (Scotland); MacDowell (USA); Sommerakademie Paul Klee (Switzerland); and Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany). Mitchell was a postdoctoral fellow at New York University in the Center for Disability Studies and is currently a visiting scholar in the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

Amanda Cachia (PhD UCSD, 2017) is Professor of Practice in Museum Studies in the School of Art at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University and Affiliate Faculty in the Disability Studies BA. Her research interests include disability art history, theory and activism, crip curatorial practices and access aesthetics, museums, institutional critique, and social justice, and critical disability approaches to translation, movement, medicine, and health. Cachia is the author of two books, Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism (2025), and The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique (2024). She is also editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (2022), which includes over 40 international contributors. She is currently working on her third book, Rehabilitating the Asylum: Mental Health Justice and Contemporary Art, which is under advance contract with Manchester University Press. Since 2010, Cachia has organized 20 art exhibitions devoted to the work of disabled artists. In 2024, her exhibition Smoke & Mirrors at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University was supported by a $180,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. Cachia’s research, writing, and curatorial work have been supported by grants and fellowships from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and the Millard Meiss Publication Fund through the College Art Association. She is a recipient of the $50,000 National Art and Disability Award (Established Category) from Creative Australia (2024).