Reviewed by Chanika Svetvilas and Jennifer Cabral-Pierce
The cover of the book has multiple colors of varying shapes–curved, and angular. The overlapping transparent colors include red, light blue, orange, yellow, and green. In the middle of the cover, there’s a white band. Across it in black text in all caps at the top the heading is “Curating Access”; and then a subheading in caps, the words “disability art activism and creative accommodation.” And underneath, in a light lavender, it states “edited by Amanda Cachia.” The Routledge logo of two profiles in lavender and white is in the lower right corner.
Curator, artist, and disability advocate Amanda Cachia reveals in twenty-four essays the promise, complexities, and creativity of incorporating access into artistic practices, curation, and programming for audiences. Curating Access provides testimony to how empowering and generative the act of creating access can be once cultural producers embrace this responsibility as their own. It is the culmination of the tenth anniversary of Cachia’s pivotal participation in a residency, on “Art inclusion: Disability, Design, Curation,” held at the University of California Irvine. The essays reveal practices generated by crip artists and harnessed for decades to sustain participation and engagement with art.
Written in five parts, Part One focuses on our post-pandemic existence when crip communities expanded from disability, chronically ill, neurodiverse, mad, and immunocompromised to also include those impacted by long COVID. During the pandemic, the fragility and ineptitude of our healthcare system and institutions were exposed. The limitations of compliance provided by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) does not equal access. As Alice Sheppard, founder of the performance group Kinetic Light describes, “disability is not incidental, but is part of a culture and aesthetic in itself.” Kevin Gotkin also summarizes, “disability is a categorical intervention into what we understand art to be.” Jennifer Cooley and Ann M. Fox argue for crip curation that fundamentally centers care. International examples are included such as Connect2Abilities, an intercultural collaboration project between Australia and Korea, that blossomed into an online community due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
For Part Two, “Curatorial Reflections,” Jennifer Justice emphasizes collaboration for designing accessible exhibitions and provides a historical framework along with case studies. Liza Sylvestre provides an experiential perspective as an artist who has incorporated access into her creative practice.
Part Three, “Access Critique,” notes the disembodied curatorial voice that positions curators as the authority and sometimes fails to acknowledge disabled users, makers, and designers.
Part Four, “Collaboration and Convention,” aims to disrupt the usual prescriptive ways of providing access that happens as an afterthought when exhibition planning is completed. An embodied negotiated collaborative process at the moment of the project conception is the alternative. In Cachia’s essay, “Networks of Care,” she highlights three feminist healthcare collectives that illustrate self-empowerment, care building, and mutual aid.
Part Five, “Artistic Access Praxis,” explores concepts of care in practice that are responsive and center disability culture like Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan’s Alt Text as Poetry Project that moves beyond compliance. Johanna Hedva shares her disability access rider for others to model.
The perspectives presented in each chapter direct readers not only to acknowledge privilege embedded in artistic production which consistently and systematically excludes disabled communities but also to recognize disabled artists and cultural producers that disrupt conventional systems of compliance and incorporate creative access, care, joy, and community.
These essays unveil the shared responsibility of creating access no matter what role one plays as a cultural producer. The role of the curator is a powerful one. Cachia mentions in her introduction, “Anyone can be a curator of access inside or outside the museum.” However, not anyone can be a curator at an institution. An increase of the disabled in roles of cultural production can also increase the awareness and implementation of accessibility. Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation has the power to activate a space that includes those with disabilities as cultural producers and those who identify as able-bodied to create accessible futures together.
Before Chanika Svetvilas and Jennifer Cabral-Pierce wrote their book review together, they had a stimulating conversation about Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation. Here’s an excerpt.
CS: I think the word that stood out for me, which I had never considered before, was ocularcentric, and realizing that yes, as a visual artist, but not only as an individual, but that our world is built on ocular-centrism.
Amanda’s Curating Access is so multifaceted and illustrates a variety of approaches to access that invites you to reflect and question your own methods in your work, and how to make it a meaningful experience for the people you want to reach.
I think what resonated for me was access as care, that if you turn the framework from this prescriptive form of compliancy to how are you caring for the people who are receiving access, I mean if you can just make that shift and not make it so impersonal. If you’re just doing it without thinking of who’s using the access, you’re not giving care. You’re just going through the motions. And so I think that’s so important to have that intimacy to be personal with how you’re treating your audience.
JC: When you mentioned intimacy it reminded me of a term used by the disability community, “access intimacy,” which was coined by activist Mia Mingus. It is such a soothing concept. An intimacy experienced when someone knows exactly what your access needs are, and addresses them without you having to ask for it.
CS: It’s more spontaneous. And it’s because of the connection you have with each other that you are able to anticipate what the need is. Yeah. There are other ways to make things accessible other than the prescriptive ways. And I love the “fireworks fingering” or is it “fingering fireworks” in Carmen Papalia’s chapter on Open Access. Oh, it’s fingerworks for fireworks!
JC: Yes
CS: That was such a beautiful translation of watching fireworks by partnering with someone who could draw the patterns and explosions on your back. I would love to be either the giver or the receiver. You can give someone a new experience, but also emphasize that everyone can see the same thing and have a different experience of it.
JC: Exactly. Papalia points out how those providing accommodations simply assume the kind of access disabled individuals need, or, worse, tell them this is what is going to be provided regardless if the accessibility given fulfills their needs or not.
Papalia’s article gave me a perspective on what disability justice really means. It made me reflect on compliance, you know. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) created this false impression that by following the law and providing the accommodations required is enough; even if providing what is required does not give what a disabled individual really needs. Papalia reminds us that accommodations are meant to create an environment that provides support to each individual so they can be their whole selves.
CS: Right, so it builds on the diversity of lived experiences.
JC: Again, if you’re just looking at access as compliance it becomes a limited experience.
CS: Yes. And not really considering it as community building, and real inclusion. You just can’t stay on the surface and I think the main thing I got from the book were the possibilities.
JC: There is now one more creative element that should be explored, and it forces me as an ocularcentric artist to expand and challenge the way I see the world. There are other ways of sensing the world, other ways to understand it. And also, how do I want someone to experience my work? And how does someone come to an understanding of it? It doesn’t have to be limited by my own understanding and comprehension of the world. I could offer other points of access to get to the meaning and message I want to transmit with my art. There are other sensations that could lead to the same meaning.
CS: Yeah, yeah, and also, I think there’s a way to communicate the whole process of creating right? Because I’m a visual artist, but I don’t just create with my eyes. I create with my whole body. And sometimes there’s endurance there. There’s so many different ways the body interacts with the art. It allows for experience to grow and to be shared with the audience in a more nuanced way.
JC: I must mention the “Disability Access Rider” template that was shared by artist Johanna Hedva. It is a guide on how to approach institutions with our access needs. In this template Hedva unapologetically lists all her access needs in order to be able to participate in an event: from food to transportation, hours of availability, ASL and CART interpreters, compensation, gender neutral bathrooms, wheelchair access, hotel accommodations, etc…
She not only encourages us to “copy/paste and circulate” this template but what I really admired the most, she also used it as a disability advocacy tool and asks these accommodations to not be made available not only during her events but for all those who they might work with in the future.
CS: It was very generous of her to share her accessibility rider. And it’s something that I plan to put thought into, and include for my own work. And I do see this book as one of the first steps to creating more accessibility in the arts. But I also hope that it’s not only curators and artists that will access the book, but also leaders in the field, or so called leaders in the field, who are in positions of power and decision making who can open up these spaces to be more accessible, so it’s not just people in the community who are doing the work–-that the power is shared with the Disability community.
JC: This book really made me more sensitive to the lack of access still prevalent in the art world. Not that I hadn’t thought about it, but it was really disheartening to read some of the testimonies of disabled individuals and their inability to attend and experience what the art community offers. Even how a body is expected to behave within a museum setting is not compatible with the needs of a low-vision individual that has to stand very closely to an artwork; or with the needs of an audio-deficient visitor who must rely on someone to speak to him with a loud voice inside a gallery space. These are not acceptable behaviors.
Personally I must confess, I was never concerned about how inaccessible a gallery was. I focused on who would attend an opening, and not on those who couldn’t attend an event because of the lack of access provided. And even when accommodations are offered, we’ve all witnessed how inconsistent ASL and CART interpretations are during Artist Talks and ZOOM events.
CS: So I think it would be nice to conclude with what our takeaways are, and how we might choose to use the text or parts of it.
JC: This book made me aware of my role in not only choosing the communities of care I want to participate in, but my role in the communities of care I am willing to create. For so long, I was concerned about receiving access, but I am more excited about the possibility of generating access and no longer expecting an outside system to provide access for me and for others.
CS: I think my takeaway is that I want to continue to build my community through my work, and that means being inclusive of everyone and all abilities, and work collaboratively with artist friends who have disabilities, and that it can be a practice that can be expanded to be more inclusive, and that it can generate new work and new ways of working. So I’m just looking forward to what I can create with this more inclusive approach.
JC: I agree. We have to not only look at access as a problem we must solve and instead, approach it instead with excitement–“Wow, this is an incredible opportunity to create an amazing opportunity for all”–otherwise, we are closing ourselves off, as institutions and as artists from the disability community. A community that is so rich and wise in its capacity to care and its capacity to sense. We are losing so much if we perpetuate these exclusions and resist choosing accessibility as an integral part of the world.
Title: Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation
Editor: Amanda Cachia
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2023
Read more interviews in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Reviewers
Chanika Svetvilas is an interdisciplinary artist and visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute, New York University.
Jennifer Cabral-Pierce is a Brazilian photographer and visual artist residing in New Jersey.