Disability Art Including Paintings and Sculptures
 |
The spectrum in Arts and Disability stretches from "meaningful daily activity" or recreation for people who have limited social and employment options to emerging artists with raw talent and a great need to find the pathways along which they can journey. Professional artists, living from their work and acknowledged by others in their genre, complete the range.
Many artists are creating enticing new work that often reflects their experiences with disabilities. Artists with disabilities see themselves as leaders of change - they can give visibility and identity to the disabled community by translating the disability experience into works of art. Some of today's best artists deal with disabilities in their everyday lives that the rest of us can’t even imagine living with, and use art to communicate with the world. The results are often stunning.
However not all emerging and professional artists who have a disability want to address the issue of disability in their work or even to have the fact of their disability known or made part of the marketing before the work has been taken on its merits. For some, this is both because their experience has led them to believe knowledge of the disability will always influence interpretation of their work and because their area of interest is not related to their disability. Other artists with similar and different disabilities speak with equal passion about their determination to have their work taken on merit. At one level, this determination can be seen to expose the ugly reality of a world that does exclude and discriminate against people who have a disability to the point they prefer to keep that private. On another level however, for some people their disability is not necessarily related to their art and therefore, not something they wish to elaborate on.
Using the creative process of art as a healing force, can unite body, mind, and spirit.
"The artist works by incorporating and gradually assimilating the exterior world until the object which he designs has become as it were a part of himself... and he can project it on the canvas as his own creation." Henri Matisse, 1940's.
List of Artists with Disability:
Niall McCormack - Recognised as a deaf Irish artist. His work is included in the dictionary of Irish Living Artists - www.niallmccormack.ie
Submit Your Art, Gallery, or Website:
If you are a person with a disability and would like to submit a picture/photo of your artwork - or if you feature your art on a website gallery - and would like your work published on Disabled World please contact us.
Articles
| Pub. Date | Topic | Author |
|---|---|---|
| 2012-05-10 | Alzheimer's Disease, Artwork, and Hope | Wendy Taormina-Weiss |
| 2012-04-12 | Larry Kirkland's Disabled American Veterans for Life Memorial Sculptures | Wendy Taormina-Weiss |
| 2011-10-13 | Art Exhibit in Honor of National Disability Employment Awareness Month | Office of the Governor Rick Perry |
| 2011-10-04 | InterACT Disability Arts Festival | Arts Access Aotearoa |
| 2011-09-24 | DaDa - Disability and Deaf Arts | Wendy Taormina-Weiss |
| 2011-09-16 | disABLEd Artists Display Artwork | disABLEd Arts program |
| 2010-05-25 | Contemporary Art Exhibition on Disability | VSA |
| 2009-02-10 | Disability Art Presented at 2009 Armory Show by VSA Arts | VSA Arts |
