Black Disabled Women Artists and the Improvisation of Confinement

• In Event: Constructing Educational Possibilities: What Disability Art and Art Education Offer in Teaching Disabled Youth

Abstract

Themes of containment, captivity, and fugitivity appear in work by non-disabled Black artists and non-Black disabled artists of all gender identities. But the resonance of modern medical apparatuses with violent racial structures past and present is significant in the work of several contemporary disabled and il Black queer women artists. To identify this theme is not to ignore the range of reference points in these artists’ disparate practices, let alone to collapse their practices, but to identify a powerful critique that can be applied to other institutions, including schools, that have perpetuated the enclosure of Black people’s minds and bodies. To quote Black disability scholar Sami Schalk (2022), there must be “(a)cknowledgement of the toll that living within violent systems takes on the bodyminds of marginalized people, particularly cultural workers actively fighting those systems” (p. 148). However, “actively fighting” is key to the intergenerational struggle that these artists are part of. Through studying and responding creatively to these artists’ works, students may come to recognize how these artists’ works proudly articulate strategies of sabotage and refusal.

Carolyn Lazard’s artwork consciously and consistently engages a critical race and disability perspective. Catherine Damman (2020) summarizes Lazard’s practice as “interrogating extractive institutional regimes such as hospitals, prisons, and art museums,” as it “enlivens alternative models in which utility and productivity are shirked in favor of noncontractual ways of orienting toward one another” (para. 1). Michael Davidson (2022) describes Lazard’s 2018 video Recipe for Disaster, in which the artist adds critical poetic captions to a captioned episode of Julia Child’s The French Chef, as moving “to new understandings of what access implies and who is invited into accessible spaces” (p, 169). Through research and strategic appropriations of technology, Lazard acerbically reflects institutions back to themselves with the apparently stoic, passive, and opaque façade that has long been associated with Blackness (Post, 2023).

Though with importantly different inflections, the patient rage that Lazard eloquently channels into installation interventions comes across clearly in the deployment of words, performances, and found and crafted objects within physical and virtual spaces by fellow artists Jessica Karuhanga, Shawanda Corbett, Joselia Hughes, and Panteha Abareshi. These multidisciplinary Black disabled artists find variegated ways to depict personal interconnection as well as embodied disconnection, in dialogue with technologies that both constrain and enable their existence. Through any and all means available to them, students can find in these artists’ works a range of ways to define their bodies and communities both through and in opposition to the institutions that contain and evaluate them.

Author

• Albert Stabler, Illinois State University