Curating Together

Abstract

This chapter discusses the unique placement of Tangled Art + Disability—a disability art organization and gallery in Toronto—in Canadian art ecology as a permanent fixture of disability art wherein professional development, intergenerational and interdependent mentorship and knowledge exchange, experimentation, and failure are welcome. After discussing how the entwined relationship between the authorial team resists traditional structural definitions of mentorship for crip modalities of growth, this chapter explores how Tangled contributes to a disability curatorial community of practice, most specifically through mentorship. It focuses on the curator-in-residence (CIR) program jointly hosted by Tangled and Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life—a research project that cultivates disability arts in Ontario—and analyzes its role in the advancement of disability rights and justice. This CIR program facilitates a unique model of mentorship that develops leadership positions for disability curators to emerge, while simultaneously innovating crip cultural practice, as is evidenced by the curatorial practice of 2019–21 CIR Max Ferguson. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Ferguson's praxis of crip curatorship, which seeks to bring a decolonial lens into disability arts, as well as the practice of accessible curation into disability culture.