Bibliographic Reference

Disability Art: A Political History is a thematic survey of the history of Disability Art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. This book argues that Disability Art is a politically and aesthetically sophisticated movement that has fundamentally reshaped contemporary art by challenging ableism, asserting agency over representation, and redefining artistic knowledge and practice. This book proceeds from the conviction that Disability Art is not a niche subfield but a transformative force within contemporary art history. Its contributions compel the discipline to reconsider entrenched assumptions about aesthetics, spectatorship, authorship, and the very definition of artistic innovation. By tracing the movement’s political foundations and aesthetic trajectories, Disability Art: A Political History positions disabled artists not at the margins of art history, but at its generative center. Arising out of the Disability Rights Movement of the 1980s, Disability Art is concerned with awareness, representation, and social justice around the lived experience of disability. This book places emphasis on how the history of Disability Art is a political one, owing to the origins and connections between the Disability Rights Movement and the Disability Arts movement, but also because Disability Art as a category or a genre is political owing to the social and cultural conditions in which disability finds itself immersed within our ableist, racist and sexist world. As the reader will discover, every theme I have assigned to each of the five chapters of the book is steeped within a particular politics regarding disabled embodiment and how art has responded to those politics in exciting and dynamic ways. This book is under contract with Yale University Press and will be released in summer, 2028.

Image credit: exhibition poster for Enabled Artists United, July 19-August 30, 1991, National Institute of Art + Disabilities