Contemporary Art and Disability Studies Alice Wexler (UCLA Center for the Study of Women, Los Angeles, CA, USA) 9780367203276

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.

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