1st Edition
Contemporary Art and Disability Studies
This book presents interdisciplinary scholarship on art and visual culture that explores disability in terms of lived experience. It will expand critical disability studies scholarship on representation and embodiment, which is theoretically rich, but lacking in attention to art.
It is organized in five thematic parts: methodologies of access, agency, and ethics in cultural institutions; the politics and ethics of collaboration; embodied representations of artists with disabilities in the visual and performing arts; negotiating the outsider art label; and first-person reflections on disability and artmaking.
This volume will be of interest to scholars who study disability studies, art history, art education, gender studies, museum studies, and visual culture.
Part I: Methodologies of Access, Agency, and Ethics in Cultural Institutions 1. Accessibility in and Beyond the Quagmire of the Present [Taraneh Fazeli] 2. For a New Accessibility [Carmen Papalia] 3. Inclusion Matters: "Are You Sure You Belong Here?" [Karen Keifer-Boyd, Michelle Kraft, and Alice Wexler] Part II: The Politics and Ethics of Collaboration: Analyzing Social Practices in Communities 4. Participatory and Community-Based Contemporary Art Practices with People with Disabilities [Mira Kallio-Tavin] 5. DaDaFest Ensemble: Leadership, Voice and Participation in Music Making [Claire Penketh, Anne James, Richard Nutter, and Sam Wades] 6. Post Traumatic Stress Poetics: Healing as Praxis in Socially Engaged Artmaking [Carol Zou] Part III: Embodied Representations of Artists with Disabilities in the Visual and Performing Arts 7. The (Narrative) Prosthesis Re-Fitted: Finding New Support for Embodied and Imagined Differences in Contemporary Art [Amanda Cachia] 8. Basilisk and the Representation of Physically Disabled Women in Film [Ann Millett-Gallant] 9. Out of Time: Crip Spacetime and Performance [Carrie Sandahl] 10. Visually Representing Illness and Disability in Tee Corinne’s Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portacath: Picturing Cancer in Our Lives [Stefanie Snider] 11. Bill Shannon: Challenging Disabling Environments and Redistributing Sense [Jack Richardson and Jennifer (Eisenhauer) Richardson] Part IV: Emerging from Anonymity: Negotiating The Outsider Art Label 12. Lee Godie: Accidental Postmodern Outsider Artist [Alice Wexler] 14. Carnival of Desires: Disability, Sex, and the Fantastical Paintings of Aurie Ramirez [Amy Mutza] Part V: Life Writing: First-Person Reflections on Disability and Artmaking 15. Presence and Absence: The Paradox of Disability in Portraiture [Riva Leher] 16. Accidents Happen: An Art Autopathography on Mental Disability [John Derby] 16 Out of the Blue: Art, Disability and Yelling [Katherine Sherwood] 17. An Interview with Four Art Professionals with Disabilities About the Traps and Benefits of Opening up About Them [Nina Stuhldreher]
Biography
Alice Wexler is Professor Emerita of Art Education at SUNY New Paltz.
John Derby was an independent scholar, secondary art and postsecondary art educator for over 20 years.
"Wexler (SUNY, New Paltz) and the late Derby, an independent scholar and art educator, collected works engaging critical disability studies and art, in terms of theory, methodology, and practice. Negotiating the concept of "outsider art," this collection includes analysis of visual art productions, primarily (self)-representations, first in the context of cultural institutions, in terms of literal and institutional accessibility, gatekeeping, and curatorial praxis. Recommended."
--Choice
"I feel as though this book—or chapters from this book—should be required reading forarts educators and policy makers and other arts professionals, particularly those who are non-disabled. For those not new to disability studies, this text provides context of a lesser-explored area within disability studies as a field: arts and cultural production. For those new to the tenetsupheld by disability studies, it also serves as a primer to language and concepts relevant to thearts but also disability studies itself."
--Research in Arts and Education
"...the chapters come together as a whole to make an argument for the relationality of disability as it appears in the art world and for the need for clear ethical and theoretical grounding for this work. Together they reflect the collaborative and intracitational nature of Disability Studies and its important implications for the contemporary art world."
--Disability Studies Quarterly
