Painter and disability scholar Katherine Sherwood is pleased to announce the publication of a chapter, “Out of the Blue: Art, Disability and Yelling,” in the the book Contemporary Art and Disability Studies (Routledge Press, 2019).
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.
An excerpt from the introduction to “Out of the Blue: Art, Disability and Yelling” by Katherine Sherwood:
My life as a painter was upended when I had a massive stroke at age 44, leaving me paralyzed in the right side of my body. Not only did the stroke require me to make technical adjustments and subsequently redefine my art practice, it also fueled a further examination of art history and how artists with disabilities fit into (and outside of) that narrative. A critical examination of how the art historical canon operates to exclude or silence artists with disabilities, as well as a probing into which kinds of collective action work most productively to bring artists in from the margins, have manifested in both my teaching and social practices. This chapter will shed light on both.
I will begin with a brief overview of my life post-stroke and how disability has affected my painting practice. I will then introduce the Yelling Clinic, an art and disability collective co-founded by Sunaura Taylor and myself. I will highlight several of the Yelling Clinic’s main activities over the years and situate our actions within a broader context of disability, globalism, and war. I will then introduce my work as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on a few main activities I was engaged in regarding teaching, presenting, and examining the work of artists with disabilities.
Finally, I will conclude with a look at Creative Growth Art Center, the oldest and largest art studio for artists with disabilities. I will focus specifically on the work of Creative Growth fiber artist Judith Scott, highlighting both her success as an artist as well as the institutional silencing she had to work against. I will ultimately use the example of Scott and other artists such as Joseph Grigely to argue that we must include the cultural work of disabled artists, historians, and scholars within the art historical canon in order to create a comprehensive and inclusive visual history.
Contemporary Art and Disability Studies
By Alice Wexler, John Derby
ISBN 9780367203276
Published December 17, 2019 by Routledge
248 Pages - 8 Color & 34 B/W Illustrations
