art smarts ~ information and inspiration for canadian artists with disabilities

Chapter 1. Introduction

Published by the Society for Disability Arts and Culture

As we began working on this book, one of the artists we interviewed told us, “What I wish I’d had when I started out was an instruction manual, something that told me all about the art world and what to expect. I want somebody who’s going to start feeding me information about how all this really works, because it’s not written down anywhere. There are lots of books on the business of being an artist, and there are courses and different entrepreneur kinds of things you can do to establish yourself, but that doesn’t really tell you the ins and outs of how the art world works.”

This book is our attempt to “feed” some information to you, as emerging artists with disabilities, and to your network of friends and supporters. Twelve artists with disabilities share what they’ve learned and are still learning on their journeys as artists. They struggle with the barriers that face all artists (like lack of financial support), as well as the ones that are particular to artists with disabilities, including lack of physical access to art institutions, lack of opportunities for less formal learning modes such as mentoring, and lack of skills and opportunities for marketing their art. If you are pursuing a career as an artist, or just want to explore your creative side and could use some pointers to help you along, then we made this manual for you.

We are the Society for Disability Arts and Culture (S4DAC), established in 1998. S4DAC was originally created to produce an international festival of disability arts, which came to be known as the kickstART! Celebration of Disability Arts and Culture, held in Vancouver in August 2001. (See Appendix A for more details about S4DAC and the kickstART! Celebration.)

With that very inspiring celebration behind us, this handbook is a next step in developing a network of Canadian artists with disabilities. We urge both individual artists with disabilities and arts groups that involve people with disabilities to use the contact sheet at the back of this handbook to help us to build a database of creative Canadians with disabilities and their allies.

S4DAC was very grateful to receive funding for this step from Human Resources Development Canada’s Social Development Partnerships Program. We’ve tried to make the information accessible and “real” by presenting it in the words of people who have been there. You don’t need to read this book in any particular order, but we recommend that you start with the artist profiles in Chapter Two before reading any other chapter, since we identify the artists throughout the rest of the handbook only by their first names. You can also request an audio tape or a paper copy of the handbook by contacting the S4DAC office.

We wanted to represent a broad range of disabilities and geographic locations, although we realized we couldn’t possibly include everything. This handbook is not intended to be comprehensive, nor to include the details of all artistic disciplines and all disabilities. Because much of what an aspiring artist needs to know will vary from region to region, we have provided a resource list to point you toward organizations that can provide information specific to your province or municipality. These resources, listed in Appendix B, provide you with information on arts organizations, funding sources and opportunities for learning. We encourage you to do further research, to use telephone listings to contact local arts organizations and to check out the World Wide Web for more resources if you have access to a computer.

Each artist will be unique in their disability, in how they identify themselves, and in how their disability affects their art-making. As you read this manual, you will see both commonalities and differences. The material draws from the life experiences of artists at different places and different levels of “success”; each has a different definition of what success is. You’ll find lots to think about here in relation to your own form of art.

Artistic expression is a personal thing and as the authors of this handbook we wanted to reflect that with a personal style of writing. Most of the text is derived from interviews with artists, and we’ve done our best to introduce topics and weave together the artists’ statements in an informal way. Because of that, we thought a word about who we are would be appropriate.

Who wrote this book?