Disabled Artists Research Articles

A wonderland for disabled artists.

A wonderland for disabled artists.

Quick Trust and Slow Time

In the last decade, the field of Disability Arts has been recognised as a powerful source of aesthetic innovation. Yinka Shonibare has described it as ‘the last remaining avant-garde movement’ (Bragg, 2007), where artists with lived experience of disability produce new combinations of form, content and politics, which engage spectators in provocative reflections on the way we relate to each other in the public sphere. Despite a range of policies, plans, protocols and funding programmes to support disabled artists and collaborations between mainstream producers and disabled artists, the statistics – at least in our context in Australia – suggest most disability art still occurs outside and alongside an industry that struggles to include these artists. In this article, we draw upon findings from a series of workshops with disabled artists around Australia, conducted as part of the ARC funded Disability in the Performing Arts in Australia: Beyond The Social Model project – known colloquially to its collaborators and participants as ‘The Last Avant Garde’ project (https://lastavantgarde.com.au) – to propose a new approach. We find that while provision of logistical access (ramps, hearing loops, interpreters) and ideological access (stories, characters, discourse and language) is critical, so is methodological access, which embodies disability culture in training, rehearsal and production processes. Disabled artists use crip culture, along with relational space and time to negotiate what happens in disability arts and culture production practices and work through desire, fear, vulnerability and reciprocity to rapidly establish trusting collaborations. It is inclusion of disability culture relationships and concepts, as much as ramps and inclusive language, that makes a practice feel safe for disabled artists – and this, we argue, is what the mainstream sector has to learn and what the disability arts sector has to teach about improving the inclusivity of the creative industries.

Reflections on Crip Imitations as Cultural Space-Making

The article reflects on the complexities of deploying imitation as a performance theme within disability arts. The authors are animated by disability arts curator Amanda Cachia’s 2019 exhibition, Automatisme Ambulatoire: Hysteria, Imitation, and Performance, which showcased disabled and nondisabled artists exploring the cultural dynamics of imitation through the performing arts. The article begins by considering how imitation enacts proximal familiarity with difference by discussing disability simulation activities, actor training systems, and forms of cultural appropriation. A disability studies framework is employed to consider how artists engage imitation as an element of disability aesthetics. The analysis is developed in conversation with four examples of disability performance—Helen Dowling’s Breaker, Claire Cunningham’s tributary, Sins Invalid’s performance An Unshamed Claim to Beauty, and Jess Thom’s rendition of Samuel Beckett’s Not I. The article posits that by enacting imitation as a performance theme, disabled artists resist notions that imitation is reserved for bodies read as “neutral,” and attend to how imitation brings disability artists into a complex dynamic of political relationality.

Reverberation! A New Wave in Disability Art


 
 
 Graduate student scholar/artists Sydney Erlikh, Maggie Bridger, and Sandie Yi reflect on their experiences of having attended VIBE: Challenging Ableism and Audism Through the Arts. The three were struck by the diversity and range of unique experiences reflected in the work of the presenting artists. Each author takes the lead on one of three themes they collectively identified: what constitutes disability art, how community shapes artistic and scholarly practice, and how boundaries of the field are evolving. The article explores the ways in which disabled artists are defining creative processes and aesthetic approaches outside of the mainstream art world and its ableist productivity demands. They also take note of how artists with non- apparent disabilities are actively moving the field in new directions. Finally, they examine the ethical dimensions of artistic “ownership” in the collaboration between artists with and without disabilities, particularly around those with intellectual disabilities and their allies. The authors ultimately offer a description of a new wave of disability art that is pushing the field to think through questions of process, collaboration, ethics, visibility, creative scholarship, and relationship to disability studies. This new work, they argue, is creating space for a more sustainable, community-based practice.
 
 

Social Role Narrative of Disabled Artists and Both Their Work in General and in Relation to Science and Technology

Artists and the arts have many different roles in society. Artists also have various roles in relation to science and technology, ranging from being users of science and technology products to being educators for science and technologies, such as in museums. Artists are also involved in science and technology governance and ethics discussions. Disabled people are also artists and produce art, and disabled people in general and disabled artists are impacted by science and technology advancements. As such, disabled artists should also engage with science and technology, as well as contribute and influence science and technology governance, ethics discussions, and science and technology education with their work. We performed a scoping study of academic literature using the 70 databases of EBSCO-HOST and the database SCOPUS (includes Medline) to investigate the social role narrative of disabled artists and both their work in general and in relation to science and technology. Our findings suggest that disabled artists are mostly engaged in the context of becoming and being a disabled artist. Beyond the work itself, the identity issue of ‘being disabled’ was a focus of the coverage of being a disabled artist. The literature covered did not provide in-depth engagement with the social role of disabled artists, their work, and the barriers encountered, and best practices needed to fulfil the social roles found in the literature for non-disabled artists and the arts. Finally, the literature covered contained little content on the relationship of disabled artists and advancements of science and technology, such as in their role of using advancements of science and technologies for making art. No content at all was found that would link disabled artists and their work to the science and technology governance and ethics discussions, and no content linking disabled artists to being educators on science and technology issues, for example, in museums was found.

Distributed Participatory Design: The challenges of designing with physically disabled musicians during a global pandemic

The global COVID-19 pandemic has been an extraordinary situation. Social distancing has impacted the vast majority of people, reorganising society, physically separating us from friends, family and colleagues. Collectively we found ourselves in a distributed state, reliant upon digital technologies to maintain social and professional connections. Some activities can translate unabated to a digital medium, with benefits, such as the convenience inherent in many online shopping and banking services. Other activities, particularly those which are socially engaged, including inclusive music-making or design, may need to be re-framed and re-thought due to the absence of in-person contact.In Northern Ireland, the Performance Without Barriers (PwB) research group works with disabled artists from the Drake Music Project Northern Ireland (DMNI) to identify ways in which technology can remove access barriers to music-making. Since disabled people are experts in their unique lived experience of disability, they must be involved in the design process, an approach known as participatory design. At the end of 2020, many of us are still adjusting to the new normal, only beginning to understand the impact of distributed digital living. In this article, we examine how the socially engaged work of PwB has been affected, changed and adapted during the pandemic throughout 2019 to 2020, expanding ideas of distributed creativity to the notion of distributed design. The authors formalise the concept of socially engaged distributed participatory design, an approach that classifies PwB’s current research activities in the area of accessible music technology design and improvised musicking. Consideration is given to the impact the notion of ‘distribution’ has on degrees of participation.

Supporting Autistic Culture in Defining Autistic Identity

Late diagnosed Autistic adults who are also practicing artists are very likely to have clues about their identities expressed in their work. This gives them the opportunity to reevaluate their meaning through a more accurate lens and proper context. It also challenges viewers and audiences to do the same and to confront misconceptions. These biases are likely to extend across all forms of cultural production. This leaves Autistic and disabled artists with a very small and unrecognized footprint in our current cultural landscape. This needs to be rectified by rejecting outmoded stereotypes and establishing committed programs of engagement with Autistic culture by our public institutions.

The Role of Museum Education in Raising Undergraduate Pre-service Teachers’ Disability Awareness: the Case of an Exhibition by Disabled Artists in Greece

In the frame of the worldwide policies towards inclusion there is a need of changes, systematic strategies and actions at different levels and settings of the society including education and cultural organizations. Museums, culture and arts have a constantly increasing role towards a more cohesive and inclusive society in terms of educational, social and cultural impact and for diverse social groups that face various barriers in their full participation in social life. Furthermore, museums as nonformal learning environments and art activities can complement different levels of formal education and courses towards a better understanding of diversity. The aforementioned are of particular importance for disabled people as well as for teachers who work with disabled children and for the enrichment of student teachers’ training in issues of disability. The aim of the present study was to investigate issues of cultural representations and the reflections of undergraduate Primary Education teachers regarding disabled artists, arts, museum and education after a visit in a temporary art exhibition of disabled artists. The participants were 33 student teachers of a University Department in Greece who attended a Museum Education course and the data were obtained via questionnaires. The results revealed the value and the need for further learning opportunities in museums and other cultural environments as well as their potential contribution in combating stereotypes, enriching and broadening undergraduate Primary Education teachers’ perceptions regarding disability with implications in the fields of Museum Studies and Museum Education, Arts, Higher Education, Special and Inclusive Education.

Neurodivergency and Interdependent Creation: Breaking into Canadian Disability Arts

Disability arts has traditionally been understood as that which is led, created, and/or curated by disabled artists. While disability arts and culture in Canada has continued to grow and develop over the last number of decades, I have perceived a notable lack of neurodivergent artists being included at disability arts events and community gatherings. I question if this lack of representation may be due in part to this perception of disability arts as having to be led exclusively by those with lived experience of disability. In this paper, I will critically engage with concepts of inter-abled artistic collaboration, interdependency and the need to re-imagine disability arts leadership structures to better include neurodivergent artists and their allies. I will further position my ideas around this topic within the context of the roundtable discussion on the future of disability arts leadership that took place at the Cripping the Arts Symposium in 2019.

Chronic pain, choreography and performance: practices of resilience

ABSTRACT This article focuses on resilience and chronic pain in the context of choreography and performance. Through critically-creatively reflecting on my practice-as-research project, Ecologies of Pain, I explore practices of resilience that emerge from turning towards and working creatively with chronic pain. I draw from two strands of the performance research – collaborating with disabled artist Raquel Meseguer and devising a new autobiographical solo performance, Pain and I. Taking disability studies as my critical framework, I think through a cripped politics of resilience, where chronic pain bodies are understood as valid, valuable and skilled.

How Does Performance Art Shape Occupational Identity & Promote Empowerment for Disabled Artists?

Abstract Date Presented 03/28/20 Performance art as an occupation for disabled artists was examined through a qualitative phenomenological design based in narrative inquiry. The research yielded three themes: (1) Belonging to a community of disability activists promotes feelings of empowerment for disabled performance artists. (2) The invisible is made visible through their craft; performance art is a means to express the inside out. (3) Space and place impact performance art. Two important subthemes will also be highlighted. Primary Author and Speaker: Kristin Monical Additional Authors and Speakers: Kate Wettergren Contributing Authors: Lisa Mahaffey

Editors' Notes

Editors' Notes

Diffractive Co-conspiracy in Queer, Crip Live Art Production

While equality, inclusivity, diversity and accessibility now regularly appear in mainstream discourse, the UK’s Equality Act (2010) paradoxically preceded a year-on-year increase in recorded cases of hate crime and discrimination based on protected characteristics such as (perceived) gender identity, sexuality and disability (Home Office 2019). A hostile environment is manifest through the ongoing cuts to Universal Credit (Schraer 2020) and the trans moral panic (Barker 2017) around the Gender Recognition Act, creating urgent times (Haraway 2016) in need of response-able address. These trends suggest that visibility and “awareness raising” are no panacea for discrimination, a matter requiring urgent critical attention. Using the lens of my research around LGBTQIA+ (queer), disabled-led (crip) live art as disidentificatory praxis (Muñoz 1999) I demonstrate how the emerging feminist new materialist methodology of co-conspiracy (de los Santos-Upton 2017) is already being effectively applied by performance art professionals to revolutionise the industry. This diffractive, response-able methodology and praxis has the potential to expose and resist the structural, institutional, political, environmental and social inequalities that queer, disabled individuals continue to face. My multimodal interdisciplinary analysis provides insight into the precarious alterity of queer, crip live artists in continuingly inaccessible/impenetrable social and artistic settings and the emancipatory political potential of applied diffraction as an action oriented rhizomatic ontology. Dissecting the entangled nature of queerness and disability, of in/visibility and making the personal public as many queer disabled artists do, this paper explores the tensions in producing radically challenging, self-exposing works that also serve as affective and affirmative provocations, poignant acts of resistance and of defiant survival. Unpacking how queer, crip identified live artists reconfigure connections by building and sharing productive tools to disassemble politics and practices of exclusion, this paper posits that diffractive co-conspiracy might be used as a productive methodology to create revolutionary communities of practice able to resist the commodification and commercialisation of live art production and wider social and political marginalisation.

Art, Disability, and Pediatrics: Applying a Disability Studies Framework

The Artist in Residence at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland offers an arts program that is deeply engaged with the field of disability studies. By moving beyond an exclusively medicalized model of disability, hospitalized children and adolescents are situated as experts on their own lived experience. Artists, art therapists, and pediatric healthcare professionals can afford young people more avenues to engage in creative dialogue with topics related to disability arts and culture. These concepts are highlighted through three examples: stop-motion animation, closed-circuit television show, and art exhibitions that feature disabled artists.

Allyship in disability arts: roles, relationships, and practices

ABSTRACTIn this article, I propose that investigation of allies, ally skills, and allyship in disability arts is overdue. I articulate some of ways in which non-arts approaches to allyship need to be adapted to meet the needs of disabled artists, given the aesthetic as well as professional and social dimensions of allyship distinctive to disability arts. In doing so, I highlight the need for new theory, terminology, and frameworks to define the different approaches to allyship, developed by different artsworkers, operating in different roles, across the different domains of disability arts and/or arts and disability practice.

Queer Spiritual Drifting

This essay charts travels to Belgium and the Netherlands as part of an Olimpias disability performance exploration of queer spiritual asylum spaces. This exploratory journey was an aspect of the wider Asylum Project: a multi-year exploration of sanctuary, edge space and communal wellbeing, led by queer disabled artists using disability culture methodologies. In this travelogue, the writer engages in score-composing in the shadows of old beguinages, women’s spiritual communities. Along the way, travelling wheels encounter environment, attitude, and emotion as well as durational aspects of pain and pleasure. The project’s focus got redirected: sites took over, and the enquiry shifted under pressure. This essay charts a performance travelogue of halts, stops and unsuspected stitching.

Assistive technology for disabled visual artists: exploring the impact of digital technologies on artistic practice

Disabled artists with physical impairments can experience significant barriers in producing creative work. Digital technologies offer alternative opportunities to support artistic practice, but there has been a lack of research investigating the impact of assistive digital tools in this context. This article explores the current practice of physically impaired visual artists and their experiences around the use of digital technologies. An online survey was conducted with professional disabled artists and followed up by face-to-face interviews with 10 invited artists. The findings illustrate the issues disabled artists experience in their practice and highlight how they are commonly using mainstream digital technologies as part of their practice. However, there is little awareness around novel forms of technology (e.g. eye gaze tracking) that present new creative opportunities. The importance of digital tools for supporting wider practice (i.e. administrative and business tasks) was also highlighted as a key area where further work is required.

Disability and Postdramatic Theater

The article explores the interweaving of theater with and by disabled artists with so-called postdramatic theater practices. It elaborates points of connection between the postdramatic concept and ...

“Be Fierce, Believe in Yourself, and Find Your People”

This is an intergenerational discussion between Joan Lipkin, artistic director and co-founder of The DisAbility Project, and Ryan Haddad, an actor, playwright, and autobiographical performer based in New York City. Lipkin and Haddad discuss how they came to their work in disability arts and culture, how they develop the work, and their aesthetic and political approaches to that work. They offer thoughts on the importance of disability theater in the present age, and offer advice to disabled artists who seek to develop their own work. The conversation was conducted over a series of weeks and has been edited.

Disability art and culture: A model for imaginative ways to integrate the community

This article suggests a turn to disabled people's formations of disability culture, as expressed in the arts, for new ways to imagine community integration. As I look to the arts, I examine not only the representations disabled artists create, but the art-making and arts-presenting processes themselves. I illustrate this argument by analyzing innovations in the integration of people with disabilities in professional concert dance in two American companies: AXIS Dance Company and Kinetic Light.