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Pamela Price, who just turned 65, wants everyone to know everything about her. The poet and artist was born in Philadelphia with cerebral palsy and has been using a wheelchair her entire life. She has turned over a huge collection of about 270 paintings, writings, photographs, videos and newspaper clippings to Undue Burden, a digital archive cataloging the creative lives of disabled, neurodivergent and chronically ill people in Philadelphia.

Created by Hook and Loop, a collective of disabled artists and activists, the Undue Burden archive currently has almost 500 records and is still growing. Price’s collection, titled “I want to tell them everything,” represents more than half of it.

It includes her abstract paintings, an undated photograph of her younger self which she notated with “I am looking cute,” and her appearance in many newspaper clippings, including her name in an above-the-fold headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer on June 21, 1976, about the death of her mother.

“She has an amazing collection from her life,” said Shannon Brooks, a Hook and Loop member who launched the archive in 2021 with Price.

“She’s had a long life going through all of the struggles and all of the joys and passions and loves that one can have living proudly as a disabled person,” she said.

The Hook and Loop collective is now in residence at the Painted Bride presenting the digital archive in a physical form. Member artist Maggie Mills creates patterned fabric loops suspended from the ceiling. Users can pull the parachute cloth and scroll through the images from the archive, which include QR codes to guide them directly to the online record.

Mills designed the interactive fabric art so it can easily be used by visitors of any height, including those seated in a wheelchair. She said a cornerstone of Hook and Loop is not just accommodating everyone’s access needs, but celebrating those needs.

“There is this really wonderful alchemy that happens when we’re creating things together and everybody is bringing their different experiences to the table,” Mills said. “The access needs that we all bring with us to the experience shape the kinds of collaborations we have.”

Mills, an artist who teaches painting at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, included her own paintings in the archive, as well as an MRI of her brain from 2014, when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. In the archive are visual documents of performance artists, including Brooks, a dancer and Julie Havard who in 2023 delivered a performance lecture about queer disability while naked in a bathtub.

There are items that might be considered mundane, like recorded Zoom meeting of Hook and Loop members, and videos of activist actions, such as a street demonstration protesting the demolition of Carousel House, the city’s only recreation center designed for people with disabilities.

“Disability history and the experiences of disabled people — they are ignored, they’re marginalized, they’re cast in a very specific way. They are narrated by other people,” Mills said. “Our stories in the archive, they are for us and they are by us. They are experiences in our own language, in all of their complexity and nuance.”

The Undue Burden archive is shaped by contributors who decide what to upload and how it should be labeled and categorized. They write their own notes for the records, highlighting whatever is most important to them.

For example, a photograph submitted by Vinetta Miller of her 50th birthday party is titled, “My Birthday Party on November 11 but my Birthday is Really on November 7.” The archival note reads: “Wendy came and her mom called my mom. My mom was talking to Wendy. She was looking for an Uber.”

Brooks said imperfection and evolution are the guiding principles of the archive.

“The history of disabled people has been pathologized so much that the word ‘disabled’ is uncomfortable for people to even say,” she said. “Our needs and our proximity as humans to sickness and disability is natural and always evolving. So our scope is also evolving.”

“What new worlds will be discovered when we actually attempt to meet our needs?” she asked.

The Hook and Loop installation at the Painted Bride is the first physical manifestation of the Undue Burden archive. Each week of the month-long residency the collective will host thematic performance and social events to draw people into the archive, with the hope more people will donate material into it. Mills designed the hanging fabric loops to become populated with donor ideas as the residency progresses.

“Undue Burden” will be on view at the Painted Bride until Nov. 23.