A culture, a coalition, a community—slowly but surely, those involved in disability arts have been building all three. The process of combatting ableism and advocating access often feels like two steps forward and one step back, but it’s worth zooming out and reflecting on the history we’re still writing, together. Disability, you’ll learn throughout this issue, is everywhere in art history. But in recent years, we’ve been forming a movement born from, and politicizing, webs of interdependence and mutual aid. I asked a handful of my comrades to help me tell the story of disability arts by choosing crucial moments and explaining their impact. What we came up with serves as a kind of timeline, syllabus, and canon all at once, and will be enjoyed, we hope, by readers who want to reminisce, as well as those catching up. It’s nowhere near complete, but still, I think, galvanizing. Look at all we’ve done, and at how much we have left to do. Look at the worlds we’re building and unbuilding, together.
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1982: “Deafness, Poetry, and Sign Language Poems,” a reading with David Wright and Dorothy Miles
Image Credit: Courtesy Faber & Faber While I was a graduate student at Oxford, a small group of students with an interest in disability organized a university-sponsored alliance that focused on access and cultural issues. Such organizations are common now; 40 years ago they were rare. One memorable event was a poetry reading that brought together two deaf poets of very different traditions: David Wright, known for his work as a poet, editor, and translator; and Dorothy Miles, a Welsh-born writer and actress who was educated at Gallaudet University in the US and performed with the National Theater of the Deaf before returning to Britain. David’s poems, written in English, were read aloud by the writer Kim Taplin; Dorothy’s were “written” and delivered in her unique conflation of British Sign Language and American Sign Language. She also translated a couple of David’s poems to sign. The reading was especially memorable for how it made clear there are different ways of being deaf, and different ways of making art out of difference. A friend of mine made silk-screen posters for the performance, and somehow one of them has survived for four decades.
—Joseph Grigely is an artist and a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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1987: Venus de Milo by Lorenza Böttner
Image Credit: Kristine Eudey/Courtesy Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York For more than 20 minutes, the Chilean-German artist stood onstage, statuesque, in a Munich theater. Covered in a fine layer of white plaster and with a cloth draped around her waist, she posed in a manner resembling the Venus de Milo. Like the ancient Greek statue, Böttner is armless, and her provocative performance invited the sorts of stares she was used to receiving, yet asked her viewers to bring a new awareness to their gaze. She was pointing out how impairment can seem downright romantic when it’s presented as a metaphor or suggested by ruins; meanwhile, in daily life, disabled people are regularly gawked at. As she broke her stillness, descended the platform, and exited stage left, she asked her audience, “Well, what would you say if the artwork moves of its own accord?” The piece is an early, landmark example of anti-ableist self-portraiture, and its message remains powerful 30-some years on.
—Emily Watlington
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1994: Chance meeting of three disabled artists in Exit Art gallery
Image Credit: Fred Scruton/Courtesy New Museum, New York One day in the fall of 1994 I was visiting a friend showing work at Exit Art in New York. There, by chance, I bumped into Liz Young and Bob Flanagan. I hadn’t met them before, but I knew they both had work on view in the city. Liz was in the show at Exit Art, “Let the Artist Live,” and Bob had a solo exhibition across the street at the New Museum. So I introduced myself, and the three of us chatted for maybe 10 minutes. It was mostly small talk about how their shows were going and the weather in NYC (they were both from LA). It seemed like nothing special then, but looking back now, I see it was something to cheer about as an early moment when disability in the art world felt normalized. Sadly, Bob died in 1996 and Liz, in 2020, but I’ll always remember this moment when disability and everyday life in the art world folded into each other.
—Joseph Grigely is an artist and a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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1995: This/Ability: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Disability and the Arts
Image Credit: Courtesy Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. The bulletin said the conference was on disability and the arts, but during those three days in 1995
at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, I watched “disability” slide in right next to “art.”Disability slipped on stage and grabbed the spotlight. Those of us out there, on what seemed like a frontier, sanctified this union. We laughed and cried, and reveled in each other. Bonds were formed, careers were launched, publishing contracts ensued. At the time, we didn’t take into account how exclusive this conference was, how white, and how tilted toward people with mobility impairments.
Disabled artists were blossoming in other geographies, in other bodies. I learned of them slowly. I see now that I was saying “we” and “our” as if I knew what I was talking about. What I do know: Anne Finger and Kenny Fries read, Mary Duffy, Carrie Sandahl, Cheryl Marie Wade, and Bob DeFelice performed, Joseph Grigely exhibited, and we all learned something we hadn’t known before.
—Simi Linton is a scholar, disability art consultant, and cofounder of Disability/Arts/NYC.
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2006: Wynn Newhouse Awards
Image Credit: Courtesy Wynn Newhouse Awards. Created at the suggestion of the late disabled art collector Wynn Newhouse, this program was early in recognizing the importance of no-strings attached grants for disabled artists. Over the years, cash prizes have been given to Park McArthur, Christine Sun Kim, Marlon Mullen, Sandie Yi, and Leroy Moore, among many others. I stumbled upon the award in the mid-2010s, when I was trying to figure out how I might address my disability more directly in my work. I was deeply influenced by the breadth of strategies and styles represented by the artists selected. It was a great honor to then receive an award in 2017—that year was pivotal for my art practice.
—Shannon Finnegan is an artist based in New York.
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2010: Disability Aesthetics by Tobin Siebers
Image Credit: Courtesy University of Michigan Press I like to say that this important book was the first to “call out” the glaring omission of disability scholarship in art history’s canon of literature and textbooks. The late University of Michigan English professor helped us realize that disability has been present as a theme in artworks throughout history and across civilizations, though it hasn’t always been named. The book gave us a long lineage of empowering representations of the disabled body, and provided a foundation for a new wave of scholarship that is still growing.
—Amanda Cachia is an independent writer and curator.
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Ed Roberts Campus by Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects
Image Credit: Tim Griffith When the Ed Roberts Campus opened in 2011, it raised the standard for accessibility in architecture. The Berkeley, California, building houses grassroots disability organizations including the Center for Independent Living, and was named for one of the key leaders of the United States Disability Rights Movement. Its signature feature is its red spiral ramp, which is the central means of ascent—an elevator and stairs are available nearby. The ramp encircles a light-filled space used for events and exhibitions, while throughout the building are more subtle forms of access, from natural lighting and high air filtration to reduce sensory discomfort, to a water feature whose sound creates a nonvisual way to navigate the space. The structure was developed with and for a diverse disability community.
—Bess Williamson is associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the author of Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design (2020).
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2012: “What Can a Body Do?” at the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College
Image Credit: Lisa Boughter/Courtesy Haverford College “What Can a Body Do?,” curated by Amanda Cachia, set the standard for disability-justice-informed curation. It featured work by Joseph Grigely, Christine Sun Kim, Park McArthur, Alison O’Daniel, Carmen Papalia, Laura Swanson, Chun-Shan “Sandie” Yi, Corban Walker, and Artur Zmijewski. The show explored what Tobin Siebers calls “disability aesthetics” while also influencing a turn to “the aesthetics of access,” a term coined by Deaf theater director Jenny Sealey. As Kristin Lindgren and Debora Sherman write in the foreword to the catalogue (which was published in print, digital, and audio formats), “Access is treated not as an afterthought but as a creative process intrinsic both to art practice and curatorial practice.” Artworks were installed at varying heights; text was available in braille, large-font, and audio; performance pieces were described from multiple perspectives. Meanwhile, an artistic movement was being formed.
—Mara Mills is associate professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University and the author of Hearing Loss and the History of Information Theory (forthcoming).
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2013: TED fellowship accommodation
Image Credit: Ryan Lash When I was awarded a TED fellowship in 2013, the organizers told me they would cover three sign language interpreters of my choice and pay for their flights, accommodations, and time. It made me realize how much access I’d missed out on.
—Christine Sun Kim is an artist based in Berlin.
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2014: “Park McArthur: Ramps” at Essex Street, New York
Image Credit: Courtesy Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York The month following the death of Marta Russell, activist and author of the landmark 1998 book Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract, Park McArthur created a Wikipedia page to honor her work. The artist then mounted the link in black vinyl on one of the white walls of Essex Street gallery. Crowded on the floor were 20 ramps, most of which had been improvised for McArthur by art spaces she visited between 2010 and 2013, locations that were not otherwise wheelchair-accessible. The collection of ramps, varying in utility and beauty, included cracked plywood boards, grit tape, a cupboard door, and a few handmade wedges. McArthur asked the lending organizations to display Ramp Access placards in their absence, directing viewers to Essex Street in an echo of a 2012 New York City law that requires signage at inaccessible entrances, bathrooms, and elevators. Now, more than 30 years after the passage of the ADA, new laws and technical solutions continue to retrofit an ableist world. “Ramps”—one of McArthur’s first solo shows—was a wake-up call for those in the art world who have the privilege of access, even as it made plain that compliance is at a bare minimum.
—Mara Mills is associate professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University and the author of Hearing Loss and the History of Information Theory (forthcoming).
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2015: “Still Life, a workshop,” at the New Museum, New York
Image Credit: Courtesy Constantina Zavitsanos Constantina Zavitsanos’s 2015 residency at the New Museum, which I co-organized with Johanna Burton and Travis Chamberlain, centered around debt, care, and planning. With Zavitsanos’s frequent collaborator Park McArthur, they organized events rooted in Mia Mingus’s concept of access intimacy as “that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else ‘gets’ your access needs.”
During one small gathering, we slowed down to attend to the needs of all as we discussed Mingus’s writing. Being in a cross-disability space, some Skyped in while others met in the basement of the fairly inaccessible art museum. The workshop’s proximity to the study group Zavitsanos hosted around Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s Undercommons linked the ways dependency is addressed in Black radical traditions to disability spheres. This early instance of Bay Area disability justice being utilized within art’s mainstream was thus recognizable as a form of undercommons. The artists’ strategy of occlusion pressurized the presumed good of visibility, and inspired my exhibition “Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time” as well as the work of other artists who have since begun using lived experience with disability as creative material, like Carolyn Lazard and Jordan Lord.
—Taraneh Fazeli is a curator and educator based in Detroit and New York.
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2015: ADA Anniversary Performances at the Whitney Museum of American Art
Image Credit: Filip Wolak In 2015 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York inaugurated an annual celebration of the passing of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, a landmark if imperfect piece of legislation that granted disabled people a number of civil rights. The Museum commissioned performances by artists including Kayla Hamilton, Kinetic Light, Rodney Evans, a company named Heidi Latsky Dance, and me. Each year, I treasure celebrating my community in the theater of this major museum. Time and again, the events create a harmonious blend of grassroots artistic work and the institutional support necessary to elevate and preserve them. And every year, the art is really good.
—Jerron Herman is a dancer and choreographic collaborator with Kinetic Light.
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2016: “Sick Woman Theory” by Johanna Hedva
Image Credit: Ian Byers-Gamber Hedva’s influential essay was written amid the Black Lives Matter protests in Los Angeles—during which time the chronically ill author was unable to get out of bed. The situation prompted the Berlin-based, Korean-American artist, writer, and musician to reflect on the different forms that protest and refusal can take. The politics of rest has since become a major theme in disability arts. Hedva reflected too on how vulnerability, “fragility,” or “weakness” are seen to feminize a person, and how race impacts which sick women are seen as threats versus which are seen as damsels in distress. In a recent reflection on the essay, which has now been translated into 10 languages, Hedva wrote that “it did not intuitively make sense to me to say that the sick are weak because being sick is fucking metal. It has nothing to do with weakness and everything to do with blood, shit, agony, vomit, pus, and death.”
The thing with being sick is, because you do it at home or in a hospital, it’s easy to think you are doing it alone. And no one ever knows what to say to you, because talking about bodies is considered awkward. Hedva’s essay scratches the surface of the sick lit genre to undo both notions in a form you can make and consume in bed.
—Emily Watlington
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2017: “Leroy Moore: Black/Brown International Disability Art and Hip-hop” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Image Credit: Filip Wolak The Krip-Hop Nation is an international network of Black disabled artists and musicians. In 2017 Leroy Moore, one of the cofounders and coordinators of the movement, gave a performance lecture at the Whitney Museum, accompanied by video, on the history of disability in hip-hop, and on the art form of Krip-Hop itself.
Moore made history, not because the Whitney legitimized the Krip-Hop movement, or even because this was Krip-Hop’s biggest public exposure up until that moment, but because the event signaled how badly the curatorial practices of institutions like the Whitney needed to change. Although 2017 was a watershed year for disability culture, this presentation was one of the few that explicitly challenged notions of race in disability art history.
Next up for the Emmy-winning Krip-Hop Nation? The Krip-Hop Institute, a space for art, culture, and education in Los Angeles.
—Alice Sheppard is a dancer and the founder and artistic director of Kinetic Light.
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2017: Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability by Aimi Hamraie
Image Credit: Courtesy University of Michigan Press Hamraie’s detailed history traces the Universal Design movement—born in the 20th century in the United States—that endeavored to create objects and built environments everyone can use. But whenever you imagine a hypothetical “everyone,” the author points out, you rely on some “normate template.” Tracing concurrent histories of governmental efforts to rehabilitate wounded veterans as useful workers on the one hand and the emergence of disabled maker cultures on the other, Hamraie teases the work of disabled activists away from patronizing corporate approaches to accessible design. In so doing, the author questions the validity of a one-size-fits-all approach to design. The book helped pave the way for the flourishing of post-universal design, or the design-for-one movement, and also helped foster a culture of consulting individuals about access needs rather than complying with a set of inflexible standards. When President Biden appointed Hamraie to the United States Access Board earlier this year, I thought, thank goodness—now we have one on the inside.
—Emily Watlington
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2017: “Sick Time, Crip Time, Sleepy Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying” at the Elizabeth Foundation, New York
Image Credit: Colin Conces Photography “Sick Time, Crip Time, Sleepy Time” was an exhibition curated by Taraneh Fazeli that featured what she called “artworks dealing with care, illness, fitness, sleep, somatic sustainability, labor, alternative temporalities, and wellness culture.” I often return to this exhibition, which was originally staged at the Elizabeth Foundation in New York but traveled and evolved over two years, as a reminder of the curatorial possibilities that disability arts can open up. Crucially, the show demonstrated that engaging earnestly with these themes involves rethinking the form of the exhibition. For example, every iteration was paired with expansive programming that often took place outside the gallery and connected to community groups committed to alternative infrastructures of care.
—Shannon Finnegan is an artist based in New York.
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2017: More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art by Georgina Kleege
Image Credit: Courtesy Oxford University Press This book, like much of the writing and curatorial work by blind art theorist Georgina Kleege, expands “visual culture” beyond its de facto association with sightedness. Kleege demonstrates how blindness brings its own aesthetic insights and can help reimagine the institutional structures that surround art. Building on her foundational work in More Than Meets the Eye, Kleege more recently argued that art museums should now become places that emphasize touch, distinguishing themselves from the sites of remote interactions that defined cultural life under Covid-19. Not only would this transform the experience of art into a tactile one, it would also transform the physical and institutional hierarchies of museums: galleries would need to be remade as the distance between visitors and works of art collapsed. Curatorial, security, and custodial staff would need to share knowledge about how to encourage physical interactions with works. Touch could transform the most policed activity in museums into a new way of creating knowledge, spaces, and pleasure.
—David Gissen is the author of The Architecture of Disability (2022) and a professor of architecture and urban history at the Parsons School of Design.
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2018: A Recipe for Disaster (2018) by Carolyn Lazard
Image Credit: Courtesy Maxwell Graham/Essex Street Lazard “retrofitted” an episode of Julia Child’s cooking show, in which the beloved chef teaches viewers how to make an omelet. The original already has captions—in fact, Child’s was the first show to require open captions, meaning that they cannot be turned on and off. But too many people complained to WGBH, so now closed captions are the norm. Lazard added audio descriptions between breaks in Child’s monologue—a simple enough task, since Child is mostly describing what she’s doing anyway. But then those descriptions needed to be captioned too, and though The French Chef was chosen because it was one of the more accessible examples in the history of television, soon, it all becomes too much, and the whole thing starts to fall apart. Then, while one voiceover is still trying to help you make an omelet regardless, a louder one recites a manifesto on accessible media, lamenting that it’s too much to fix something so broken and asking that we start from scratch instead. In the four years that have passed, so many promising artworks have done just that.
—Emily Watlington
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2019: I wanna be with you everywhere
Image Credit: Mengwen Cao When I try and dream up the ideal access ecology for my bodymind, I think back on this April 2019 festival at Performance Space in New York. I remember a menu of seating options, including cube-shaped beds, rolling office chairs, and floor cushions. I remember the low-stimulus environment with dim lighting and stim toys. I remember a table where you could get your transit fare reimbursed in cash on the spot. I remember releasing the little reserve of energy I usually protect in case I encounter an access crisis. Here, I dissolved into that ineffable calm brought about through what organizer Mia Mingus calls “access intimacy”—the feeling that crops up when you can trust others to have your access needs in mind. Disabled artistry including NEVE’s Lover of Low Creatures and Kayla Hamilton’s Nearly Sighted/unearthing the dark was surrounded by access abundance. The event was a temporary portal to relief from the unrelenting ableism of everyday life that we cannot escape alone.
—Kevin Gotkin is an organizer with Kinetic Light, a disability arts collective, a cofounder of Disability/Arts/NYC, and the author of the weekly newsletter Crip News.
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2020: Christine Sun Kim at Super Bowl LIV
Image Credit: AJ Mast/Courtesy François Ghebaly Gallery Seeing Christine Sun Kim—or at least, a glimpse of her—performing the national anthem in American Sign Language alongside singers Yolanda Adams and Demi Lovato at the Super Bowl was nothing short of revolutionary. I have known the Deaf artist since 2012, when I invited her to participate in one of my first exhibitions on disability art, “What Can a Body Do?,” so I was elated to see her achieve this level of exposure. Unfortunately, only a few seconds of her performance made the official cut, making the clip of her performance feel like a snapshot of disability’s role in popular culture. As Kim put it in a New York Times op-ed following her performance, the event brought together both “patriotism and protest,” “joy and frustration.” Her few seconds in the limelight showed how far we’ve come and how much more progress needs to be made.
—Amanda Cachia is an independent writer and curator.
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2020: Remote Access Dance Parties by Critical Design Lab
Image Credit: Courtesy Critical Design Lab The last thing I wanted to do in 2020 was spend more time on Zoom—unless it was for a Remote Access Dance Party. The parties were led by Kevin Gotkin aka DJ WhoGirl, who specializes in accessible nightlife, and taught me that making something accessible is a lot like being an attentive host who checks in and makes sure guests feel welcome. People took turns describing the music and the livestreams showing people dancing in their apartments, and these gestures were not just about complying with accessibility standards, but rather part of cultivating the party’s good vibe, as well as a way of building community. Disabled partygoers brought their spirit of creative adaptability to Zoom—which elsewhere usually felt like a sad backup option—and miraculously made it fun.
—Emily Watlington