Wasl Muscle: Organizer Kitty Cone addresses the Victory rally on April 30 in SF. (San Francisco Examiner Archive)
Wasl Muscle (2026)
Wasl Muscle is a series of works commemorating the 504 Sit-Ins of 1977, in which over 100 disabled activists occupied a federal building in San Francisco for 25 days—the longest in U.S. history—paving the way for the American Disabilities Act (1990). I emboss figures of the activists, drawn from archival photographs, into discarded library books sourced from the Bay Area using a machine used to test the strength of concrete. The extreme mechanical pressure enacts the systemic oppression these activists and disabled people routinely endure. The embossed figures are then painted in the tradition of South Asian miniature painting, which lends the work its title. Miniature painting is traditionally executed on wasli—paper pasted together in layers for durability—a word derived from the Urdu wasl, meaning "join" or "union," resonant with political solidarity, collective care, and interdependent disabled life. The English word muscle, meaning strength, also echoes the Hindi masal, to crush—naming both the force applied to these books and political protests. By substituting machine-compressed books for the hand-layered wasli surface, I resist the romanticization of labor the tradition often demands. The resulting objects appear wood-like and resemble an archaeological artifact, invoking crip and queer time as deep time: slow, sedimentary, and enduring.