Cultivating Disability Arts in Ontario

Abstract

Although there is a vibrant Disability Arts scene in Canada’s most populated province Ontario, until recently few spaces have existed where disability-identified artists could receive professional development and exhibition opportunities. Because of this cultural gap, the multimedia storytelling workshops and theatre project central to the arts-informed research of Re•Vision attracted disability artists who seized these workshops as spaces to access equipment, training, and peers and used them as a place to create new work. Through this paper, we discuss how these workshops functioned within our research project, which had objectives quite apart from the creation of disability arts, and highlight how participants used these workshops as well as the disability art they encountered and produced within them as pivotal to their artistic development and self-identification as artists. We posit how these research workshops contributed to the development of disability art and disability aesthetics in Ontario by reflecting on the artwork produced within them.

Keywords: disability studies, disability arts and culture, aesthetics, arts-informed research, arts-based activism