New Art Emerging from Disability & Deaf Cultures

Canadian Journal of Disability Studies

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...

Arts and disability. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford University Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.37, 2021

Summary Art is a significant source of expression for people with a disability and it also represents them in important ways. The work of artists with a disability can augment viewer’s feelings about them, or, to put this another way, the work of artists with a disability can create social change. Not all of the artwork made by artists with a disability is “about” disability, and this separation between being an artist with a disability who makes art, and making artwork examining disability, is often a crucial distinction to make for those involved in the development of disability arts as a social movement. In light of this distinction, art of all kinds can provide us with powerful knowledge about disability, while also facilitating an important professional career trajectory. When art is made by an artist with a disability, and is about disability-related issues, the work created is usually called disability arts. When the work is made by someone with a disability but is not about disability, it may not necessarily be considered disability arts. This collection of work that is less concerned with identity politics is important, and is also worthy of independent consideration.

Learning Disability Quarterly, 2011

In this essay I consider the arts-created and performed by artists v^/ith disabilities-as a site of productive knowledge for educators willing to interrogate the limits of scientific ways of understanding disability. A sample of artists who deploy the arts for self-understanding and self-expression informed by their experience living with disability in contemporary society is included here. The artists represent all disability categories in an effort to encourage LDQ readers to probe the multiple possibilities that exist for researching learning disabilities by reflecting on the cultural meanings ascribed to disability experience, and, in particular, those meanings authored by individuals with disabilities. The cultural flashpoints described here reflect a shift in understanding the disability experience in the present moment and, as such, hold great promise for translation and application by researchers and educators.

International Research Journal Persons with Special Needs and Rehabilitation Management, 2018

The perceptions about disabilities have encountered several shifts over the decades due to the various disability rights movements and the introduction of different models of disability over time. The disability rights movements, particularly those of the 1990s in the US, raised many slogans and used the existing ones to convey the perspectives of the disabled community. One notable among them was "Nothing about us without us". In this paper, I have attempted to explore the interaction between art and disability using the slogan as the basis for the paper structure where I have discussed, through examples, the three aspects of it - art for the disabled, art about the disabled and art by the disabled. In the first section of the paper, I have examined the subculture of Braille graffiti and how it can be seen as an initiative which seeks to entertain the visually impaired and acts as a new medium of social and public display of inclusive and accessible art along with analysing the underlying politics of the field. The paper examines some examples of Braille graffiti art in Nantes, Budapest and Venice and later, a similar initiative by a Russian NGO called Belaya Trost. In the second part of the paper, I have discussed the implications of the dissemination of art by the disabled and about the disabled and used the example of nineteenth-century Expressionist painter Edvard Munch's artwork The Scream. Edvard Munch's agoraphobia and some psychiatric disorders had influenced much of his painting style and themes. The Scream is often seen as a depiction of a disability (as some scholars have pointed out, and have been discussed in the paper) by a mentally disabled artist who suffered from a form of schizophrenia with complications. Additionally, the paper has discussed how certain artworks sometimes tend to edge towards inspiration porn and, at times, the disability of the artist becomes a marker of inspiration for the content or for its shock value. The paper has endeavoured to paint a coherent picture of how art intersects with the theme of disability and its dependence on the lived experiences of the disabled along with the often (mis)conceived images that the society indulges in. ISSN: 2321-9254