disability art

disability art, any creative work that explores a disability experience, either in content or in form. Although the term disability art is sometimes restricted to artwork that is intended primarily for audiences with disabilities, many disabled artists create work that is intended for audiences that include both disabled and nondisabled people. Occasionally the term is used to refer to any artwork created by a disabled person, whether referencing disability or not, but that usage is uncommon among members of the disability community. A primary function of disability art has been to articulate for the disability community as well as for the mainstream what disability means—politically, personally, and aesthetically.

Disability art across media shares themes that have helped to shape disability culture: an engagement with political issues relevant to people with disabilities, a challenge to stereotypes, a focus on the lived experience of disability, and the development of alternative aesthetics based on the particularities of the bodies and minds of people with disabilities.

Gallery openings, theatrical performances, and film festivals that feature disability art draw large numbers of attendees with disabilities. Those venues necessarily provide access (such as wheelchair ramps and accessible bathrooms) and accommodations (such as audio description and American Sign Language interpreters) that may be unavailable in the larger community. If access and accommodations are not part of the event, then the featured artwork cannot be properly described as “disability art,” even if the work features disability themes or disabled artists.

Frequently, disability art has an explicit or implicit political edge, its themes and aesthetics running counter to prevailing notions of disability. Disability art can explicitly expose the marginalization and societal mistreatment of disabled people. Because of that tendency, disability art often finds audiences at events such as activist gatherings and conferences, and it is therefore considered an important part of the disability rights movement. Disability art also forms the base of support for the emergence of disability culture, in which disabled people—diverse in impairment type, race, class, gender, and sexuality—share certain experiences, values, and perspectives. Disability art events provide an occasion for disabled people to gather and define themselves as a community.

Often, disability art explicitly rejects, critiques, or complicates traditional representations of people with disabilities. Those representations include stereotyping of disabled people as objects of pity, medical intervention, inspiration, fear, curiosity, or wonder. Artists use a number of techniques to engage with those stereotypes. For example, they inhabit stereotypes through parody, thus disarming the power of stereotypes, to shame through the use of humour. They call explicit attention to stereotypes and then compare them to the lived experience of disability. Or they simply offer alternative visions of their bodies and lives that run counter to stereotypical representations without explicit commentary.

Artists with disabilities often use autobiographical material, whether in individual or collaborative work. A sense of urgency is palpable in those pieces, a sense that the actual stories of disabled people have been ignored, silenced, or diminished and therefore must be told. Autobiography offers first-person testimony of life with a disability, a corrective to traditional stereotypical representations. That work helps to clarify pressing political issues and personal concerns for its audiences.

Artists also represent the lived experience of disability by making work about the lives of historical figures with disabilities in a non-stereotypical way. Another tactic is to focus on how disability influenced or informed a historical figure whose disability identity has been downplayed or omitted from the historical record.

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Disability art often fosters disability pride by embracing a politicized disability identity, celebrating bodily difference, and consciously participating in the building of a distinct disability community. American theatre artist and scholar Victoria Ann Lewis suggested that such work exhibits “disability cool,” a term the disability community uses to describe a revaluation and resignification of the very markers of disability and impairment that traditionally connote shame.

Traditional arts have evolved and become conventionalized over time according to bodies considered appropriate to each artistic medium. The body appropriate to perform ballet, for example, is different from the body considered appropriate to painting. The ballerina must be extremely thin, petite in stature, and symmetrical, with a long neck and strong limbs. Whereas painters may not have such extreme physical requirements, they are generally assumed to have full use of their arms, hands, and eyes. Therefore, a ballerina in a wheelchair and a painter who uses his mouth to hold a paintbrush necessarily alter the aesthetics of their media. The particularities of their bodies transform the media in which they work. Disability artists who are most successful take advantage of the transformative potential of difference rather than trying to fit their nonstandard bodies into standardized conventions. The sometimes startling and innovative results of those artistic experimentations are known as disability aesthetics. Such aesthetics can also include an aestheticizing of assistive devices—such as canes, guide dogs, and interpreters—into the artwork itself. That inclusion runs counter to the tendency to consider such devices “add-ons” that are not part of the artwork itself.

Disabled artists must continually struggle to have their work taken seriously by art establishments and to be considered “professional.” Few disabled artists have had access to quality training programs, because of discriminatory admissions practices and rigid, unimaginative curricula that do not accommodate a variety of abilities. In addition, art therapy programs were often the only art training available to disabled people. Those programs are not intended to provide professional training for their participants. The lack of access to training and the medicalization of disability art led to a stigmatization of disabled artists as amateurish, lacking in sophistication. Conversely, artists with disabilities can be branded outsider artists, especially when their work focuses on the subject matter of impairments or people with disabilities. That stigma remains despite the increasing numbers of professionally trained disabled artists and the increased visibility of disability art in mainstream venues. Nevertheless, disability art reflects the move toward self-determination in the cultural arena; disabled artists are consciously reshaping the media that have always shaped them in the public sphere.