scholarly journals Reverberation! A New Wave in Disability Art

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
Maggie Bridger ◽  
Sydney Erlikh ◽  
Chun-shan Yi

Graduate student scholar/artists Sydney Erlikh, Maggie Bridger, and Sandie Yi reflect on their experiences of having attended VIBE: Challenging Ableism and Audism Through the Arts. The three were struck by the diversity and range of unique experiences reflected in the work of the presenting artists. Each author takes the lead on one of three themes they collectively identified: what constitutes disability art, how community shapes artistic and scholarly practice, and how boundaries of the field are evolving. The article explores the ways in which disabled artists are defining creative processes and aesthetic approaches outside of the mainstream art world and its ableist productivity demands. They also take note of how artists with non- apparent disabilities are actively moving the field in new directions. Finally, they examine the ethical dimensions of artistic “ownership” in the collaboration between artists with and without disabilities, particularly around those with intellectual disabilities and their allies. The authors ultimately offer a description of a new wave of disability art that is pushing the field to think through questions of process, collaboration, ethics, visibility, creative scholarship, and relationship to disability studies. This new work, they argue, is creating space for a more sustainable, community-based practice.

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Purchase

Social practices, whether described as socially-engaged, participatory or community-based, share the potential to transform audience members into active participants in an artwork or project. However, the purpose of this public engagement is sometimes in conflict with the private experience of the viewer, constructing a complex relationship between audience, artist and gallery. Beginning by contextualizing the historic position of the audience in relation to the arts, the present article uses this as grounding to unpick elements of the dynamic which exist today. ‘The audience’ investigates the reported social benefits of engaging in the arts, questioning how evidence of these positive effects is reported and judged. This article exemplifies Marcelo Sánchez-Camus’ work with patients in palliative care and Spacemakers’ community-based projects as artworks intended to instigate positive social change. Further, ‘The artist’ explores the relationship between those facilitating these projects and their audience. By breaking down the term ‘audience’ into viewers, participants, collaborators and co-authors, one can use levels of agency to segment those involved and the differing experiences of their involvement. Petra Bauer’s long-term collaborative work with SCOT PEP is used to demonstrate how a group’s agency and stakes within an artwork can be enhanced by building relationships on equal terms. Finally, ‘The gallery’, uses the high-profile examples of Tate Group and Venice Biennale to demonstrate how the more powerful entities in the art world can misrepresent engagement and participation as quantitative markers of success or accessibility. This article ultimately aims to question what motivates the production of social practice and how these entities are important in constituting a successful process and outcome, for audience, artist and institute.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 643-643
Author(s):  
Jamie Dunlap ◽  
Steven Horner ◽  
Catherine Richmond-Cullen

Abstract From the grassroots development of creative aging research to broad base community collaborations that address the issues of today and tomorrow, this presentation will illustrate how state departments of aging and state arts agencies can combine to partnership with research universities to demonstrate the efficacy of the arts to mediate problems of loneliness, isolation and caregiver stress. This case study will show how resources can be expanded and effective practices established through community based research to find ways to build healthy and engaging communities that serve to break down the barriers of isolation and promote social networks.


2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 65-76
Author(s):  
Nancy Marie Mithlo

The traveling art exhibit Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World (2017–2018) demonstrated three powerful art world tendencies: the use of fraud as an artistic register, the assertion of the artist as authority, and the decontextualization of the arts as an object-centered analysis. These three approaches are congruent with capitalism and the private market, while simultaneously negating Indigenous values of community-based knowledges that operate largely outside the commercial sphere. An analysis of these competing art world values reveals the complicity of public museums with private gain and not education, their stated mission. Ethnic fraud demonstrates how art institutions and their staff employ “selective worth” as a means to cloak the arbitrary exertion of power and simultaneous rejection of Indigenous studies as academic discipline built on the value of tribal sovereignty. Serving as a backdrop for these conversations are a discussion of the history of Native approaches to museology from the early tribal museum era forward and an examination of current “reformist” and “radical” approaches to theorizing Native arts.


Author(s):  
Tom McLeish

‘I could not see any place in science for my creativity or imagination’, was the explanation, of a bright school leaver to the author, of why she had abandoned all study of science. Yet as any scientist knows, the imagination is essential to the immense task of re-creating a shared model of nature from the scale of the cosmos, through biological complexity, to the smallest subatomic structures. Encounters like that one inspired this book, which takes a journey through the creative process in the arts as well as sciences. Visiting great creative people of the past, it also draws on personal accounts of scientists, artists, mathematicians, writers, and musicians today to explore the commonalities and differences in creation. Tom McLeish finds that the ‘Two Cultures’ division between the arts and the sciences is not after all, the best classification of creative processes, for all creation calls on the power of the imagination within the constraints of form. Instead, the three modes of visual, textual, and abstract imagination have woven the stories of the arts and sciences together, but using different tools. As well as panoramic assessments of creativity, calling on ideas from the ancient world, medieval thought, and twentieth-century philosophy and theology, The Poetry and Music of Science illustrates its emerging story by specific close-up explorations of musical (Schumann), literary (James, Woolf, Goethe) mathematical (Wiles), and scientific (Humboldt, Einstein) creation. The book concludes by asking how creativity contributes to what it means to be human.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 451
Author(s):  
Rebekah Lamb

This essay introduces and examines aspects of the theological aesthetics of contemporary Canadian artist, Michael D. O’Brien (1948–). It also considers how his philosophy of the arts informs understandings of the Catholic imagination. In so doing, it focuses on his view that prayer is the primary source of imaginative expression, allowing the artist to operate from a position of humble receptivity to the transcendent. O’Brien studies is a nascent field, owing much of its development in recent years to the pioneering work of Clemens Cavallin. Apart from Cavallin, few scholars have focused on O’Brien’s extensive collection of paintings (principally because the first catalogue of his art was only published in 2019). Instead, they have worked on his prodigious output of novels and essays. In prioritising O’Brien’s paintings, this study will assess the relationship between his theological reflections on the Catholic imagination and art practice. By focusing on the interface between theory and practice in O’Brien’s art, this article shows that conversations about the philosophy of the Catholic imagination benefit from attending to the inner standing points of contemporary artists who see in the arts a place where faith and praxis meet. In certain instances, I will include images of O’Brien’s devotional art to further illustrate his contemplative, Christ-centred approach to aesthetics. Overall, this study offers new directions in O’Brien studies and scholarship on the philosophy of the Catholic imagination.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-63
Author(s):  
Robert A. Stebbins

AbstractAn association is “a relatively formally structured nonprofit group that depends mainly on volunteer members for participation and activity and that primarily seeks member benefits, even if it may also seek some public benefits” (Smith, Stebbins, & Dover, 2006, p. 23). The arts that give birth to these organizations can be classified as either fine art or entertainment art. Every art association is embedded each in its own art world and its own social world. Members of these association are mostly amateurs or hobbyists in their art.Publications on arts-related amateur, hobbyist, professional, and mixed-member associations are reviewed. Their prime mission is to foster, present, and sometimes chronicle the art that its members prize. Many of these works report on the structure of the associations as well as on the recruitment, artistic development, deployment of artists, dissemination of their art, and retention of their members. Also reviewed is a selection of publications bearing on what could be called “arts consumption clubs,” or groups such as book clubs, dance clubs, and jazz clubs established to generate interest in a given art. Some of the publications reviewed center on associational management, use of volunteers, and financial base of the group.


Addiction ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 113 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-371 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yorghos Apostolopoulos ◽  
Michael K. Lemke ◽  
Adam E. Barry ◽  
Kristen Hassmiller Lich

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-265
Author(s):  
Miriam Torzillo

Dance education is rarely taught in Australian primary schools. A National Arts curriculum was published online in 2014, and ready for implementation the following year. Therefore schools and teachers will be looking for models and frameworks that will help them implement the arts, including dance. The author experienced the work of the community-based dance company Dance Exchange during a summer institute in 2013. For a teacher of dance in a relatively isolated regional town, taking part in the summer institute was a rare opportunity to nourish creative inspiration and a reminder of the importance of the collaborative creative process and the embodied experience within Dance Education.


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