Disability and Art

This guide provides information on disability in the arts, disability art, and disability studies. Included are links to resources such as artists, books, websites, articles, media, and organizations about this topic. The people highlighted in this guide are either artists with documented disabilities or artists who create art centering disabilities, their own or otherwise. For this guide, a disabled person is defined as anyone who is disabled by barriers within our society, not by their impairment or difference. This follows the social model of disability and includes artists with mental illnesses who require high levels of support, such as Yayoi Kusama, who has been highlighted in this guide. We acknowledge that disability cannot be encompassed by a singular definition and that the discourse within the community is ever-changing.  

This guide does not represent a comprehensive or definitive list of all the important artists, pieces, and texts related to disability in the arts. The highlighted people and resources were selected using library materials, popular press articles, and museum websites.

Guide created and augmented at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as part of the #FromMargintoCenter initiative at the Ricker Library of Architecture and Art. Edited for use by Indiana University-Bloomington by graduate assistant, Loesje Krabbe.