Discussing disability arts with Sean Lee

In the 2nd episode of Curating Tools podcast, host Maria Cynkier is talking with Sean Lee, the director of programming at Tangled Art and Disability, an organization committed to showcasing the work of mad, deaf, and disabled artists. 

In the below transcript from a podcast episode, Sean discusses their practice as an artist and curator, as well as their exploration of disability arts as the last avant-garde movement. They delve into the concept of access and its transformative potential, challenging prevailing notions in mainstream society. 

This excerpt provides a glimpse into an insightful conversation that continues in the full episode, exclusively available to CFC Members. A shorter version of the episode can be accessed by everyone on popular streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music. 

We encourage you to dive into the transcript of this engaging conversation and listen to the full episode to gain a deeper understanding of inclusive curatorial practices and the profound impact of disability arts.

 

 

Maria Cynkier

Sean Lee is an artist and curator exploring the notion of disability arts as the last avant-garde orienting towards a crip horizon he is interested in the transformative possibilities of crip community building and accessible curatorial practice. So Sean, can we start with this short introduction and can you tell me more about yourself your practice and yourself?

 

Sean Lee

Sure. I’m the director of programming at Tangled Art and Disability. We’re based in Toronto or Tkaronto, the traditional territories of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat, of the credit we’re on Treaty 13 which is a treaty between the Mississaugas and the Canadian government. Tangled is a disability art and culture organization I like to think of it as a site for political engagement with disability arts. We’re a space that operates an art gallery that’s dedicated to exhibiting the work of mad, deaf and disabled artists. As well as advancing accessible curatorial practices, I like to think of us as a space that engages with what it means to orient towards disability culture. , thinking of disability as a space that we all share and disability as a way of being that has shared cultural practices and meaning and , something that we can dwell on and desire rather than try to eliminate.

 

So the work that I do as an artist and as a curator is oftentimes about challenging the ideas around disability that currently prevail in our mainstream society and instead thinking about some of the ways that disability arts help us to rethink and rebuild the world in kind of more expansive and more nuanced ways, particularly like orienting towards a crip sort of horizon if you will. , thinking constantly about how it is that we can move towards a culture, a space, a society that is more open to the disruption of disability. Alongside my position at Tangled, I also do independent curation, I teach and I’m a board member as well at ah CARFAC Ontario which is a representation kind of organization for artists here in Ontario and I’m also on the board of the Toronto Arts Council. I’m on a number of advisories and a lot of my work is about, how can we think about access, how can we think about disability arts as telling stories different from what’s been prevailing in the mainstream.

 

Maria Cynkier

Your practice is very impressive. You mentioned all those spaces and disability arts being a very political space. We’re here today also to talk about the course that you’re teaching Inclusive Curatorial Practices: Accessibility, Representation and Diversity. You’re teaching a module on this course at Node Center for Curatorial Studies.

 

I was preparing for this conversation and I watched your talk with Yinka Shonibare, a fantastic artist for anyone listening, please check his work, who mentioned that artists with disabilities, I’m paraphrasing here, can achieve the same amazing things as artists who do not have disabilities but and all they need is access. So can we start by discussing access, what is it to you as a curator and artist? 

 

Sean Lee

Oh yeah, ah, that’s such an interesting question because I’m always thinking about how I can continue to push my idea of what access is, right? And that conversation with Yinka who’s so brilliant and just such an incredible artist. What I really loved was that Yinka in 2007 was part of a panel where he was discussing disability arts and he sort of very boldly proclaimed that disability arts is the last remaining avant-garde movement. It sort of follows up on his observation that the emerging and growing momentum of disability arts the disability arts movement paralleled the emergence of movements like the feminist arts movements, black arts and queer arts movements in the 60s and 70s. They were all very powerful vehicles for social change. A lot of times we have these ideas that access is about compliance access is about a certain minimum standard that we have to achieve or conform to and I think the reason for this is that historically access has been a part of the disability rights movement and… sorry this is kind of a long ramble [laughter]

 

Maria Cynkier

I think having the background of what’s and disability Arts movement and Disability Justice would be great, yes. Please continue.

 

Sean Lee

Well, as I was saying, the reason access is so often brought into these narrow understandings is because in the 60s and the 70s in Western culture in the US and Canada in particular there was kind of inspiration by the great civil rights movements of the time. Disabled folks looking to the other movements really began to question why so many people with disabilities were institutionalized and isolated and excluded from participating in our social sectors and so at the time things like a disability act hadn’t been passed and so the world was largely entirely inaccessible to crip folks and so the conversations that began were very radical. They were about interrogating society’s assumptions about what disabled people can or can’t do, and how we disabled folks should live. And so, when we as a disability community began to gather and began to organize, it was about challenging the exclusion and the lack of choice. All the discrimination that disabled folks faced and was the beginning of the disability rights movement which was a real turning point in Western culture, that advocated for disability to be recognized as a human rights issue and a legislative issue. So and so how did that get that was through?

 

It was the disability rights movement was really about how can we create access so people can get through the door and ultimately because we live in a capitalist world, the notion of access sort of got watered down and trickled down as it went through the legislative process and so in order to get buy-in, for instance, disability rights was passed through the language of accommodation and it was justified through injured war vets returning from the Vietnam war and politicians sort of gained traction for disability rights through this lens of rehabilitation, how can disabled people also be contributing members of society? And so, access was sort of focused around the physical ways that disability could be mitigated in society so that people could become “independent and economic and political citizens” and so access in this sort of manifestation under the terms of capitalism was oftentimes through these checkbox approaches. It was about, how can we bring people through the door into the building. And it very often didn’t think about what were we bringing people into, what are adequate and meaningful ways of thinking about not just our survival but our thrival, right? And so access to me is actually kind of very much not about just how can we get people into the door, how can we include people into a society that doesn’t work for most of us. But instead, access is about taking like a very critical approach towards how it is that we think about this society that’s allowed people to be excluded, to be falling through the gaps. How can disability culture really think about a whole different way of living in our body-minds. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, who’s an incredible disability writer and activists, talks about how do you’re just doing disability justice. How do you’re doing access work? And it’s because nothing will ever go right? There’s no one size fits all solution and disability is oftentimes too wild to fit into the industrial complexes that we’ve sort of been taught to operate in. And so for me, access is part of a tool. It’s part of a host of cultural practices that we can use to take up this sort of never finished project. To build new practices, to build different ways of navigating the world really and I think it’s full of political potential when it’s brought on with by disabled folks to think about a different world. It’s about worldbuilding and world dismantling towards just and equitable way of experiencing the culture and that’s through access, and access can take on so many different meanings and different understandings and it’s constantly challenged and it’s constantly challenging like what it means to participate in culture. So I think I answered your question by sort of giving this long story of why I can’t really answer it. 

 

Maria Cynkier

A lot for what of what I’ve heard just from you talking right now is people with disabilities doing the work themselves. Organizing and fighting for their rights, and for access, for the opportunity to participate in the society. But as you said society isn’t allowing people with disabilities to fully participate in it, and I think that’s partially what the social model of disability comes from, right? It’s when society disables individuals.

 

Sean Lee

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean the social model of disability was given to us by disability rights movements that work to understand that really access the lack or the lack of access is. The disabling factor in society and what the social model does is, it sort of separates the idea of impairment and disablement. The social model holds that a person isn’t disabled because of their impairment or health condition. But rather, the social model is about how the lack of access is disabling and it was developed by disabled people to sort of identify and really take action against the lack of access. When we talk about the social model, I have to contrast it with the traditional model which is the medical model of disability, which isolates disability solely to the individual. and it identifies disability as a medical problem only.

 

It focuses on what a person can or can’t do because of their physical or mental or neurological characteristics. And the social model sort of takes away the focus from the impairment and instead thinks about access as something systemic. It places the responsibility of access on the systemic ways that we experience culture in organizational and governmental and public sectors to identify places where we need to remove barriers and increase access. Under the social model, disability is framed as a social construct that is created by the barriers that we experience and by the historic ways that society was built without disabled folks in mind, and the sort of most obvious analogy is basically like where you might experience a building that’s been built with steps, and is it the impairment that’s stopping somebody from going into the building or the steps? And you can see that if a building has simply been built with disabled folks in mind, then we would have an entirely different orientation of culture of the architecture, of design really, and I think that’s where the social model kind of makes clear the separation of impairment and disablement.

 

Maria Cynkier

You said that the only issue with kind of with access isn’t just getting people through their doors and in the context of art, I think that’s often a misconception. Because we have these legislations, we have these laws that require museums, and galleries to install ramps or lifts or make the entrances accessible, and include some accessible interpretation materials in exhibitions. I think there’s more and more awareness of these issues that the audiences face. I think that’s only half of the issue that is currently present in the art world. And another issue is the access to what kind of content or programming that we are presenting. Is it inclusive? Is it representative of the society that we live in? So following on that, I’d like to ask you more about your role at Tangled, where you’re the director of programming, what do you do to make their programming more accessible?

 

Sean Lee

I think what you just touched on is so important because we oftentimes in the arts only think of access for audiences. And as a disability arts curator, I think a big part of it is recognizing that yes, of course, conventional access for museum-goers and gallery- goers are very important but disability justice activist Mia Mingus says this best – that we don’t just want to join the ranks of the privileged but we want to dismantle those ranks. We don’t want to just join and assimilate into a culture that has so wholly rejected us in history and so a big part of my work is about what does it mean to dismantle those ranks and systems that maintain ableism. When I first started my role in curation I was very much unfamiliar with disability culture, I had been somebody who was deprived of a disability community and didn’t really have access to a lot of folks who had similar experiences to me and so part of how I’ve been experiencing my role has been building up what it means to participate culturally in disability and that’s meant shifting my understanding of access away from sort of inclusion and assimilation to setting the agenda to determine ourselves, what disability culture is. One of the most exciting parts of disability Arts curation has been disability Arts organization to be on the cutting edge of what access means and being allowed to define Crip aesthetics on our own terms, and one of those ways that I always go to is the field of Creative access which is a term coined by disability arts curator Amanda Cachia and it intersects into the larger body of disability arts curation. Creative access was something that I first learned about when I came to Tangled and it’s about thinking of access as this very generative artistic field, and it asks us to understand accessibility as an artistic experience solely rather than solely as a logistical one. It means that we can think of a creative methodology when we employ access and we we need to set up an environment where disability can take on an aesthetic that is part of its own culture. So establishing an idea of the aesthetics of access means creating an environment where that practice can thrive, having artists that are supported by a process that suits their body, mind, having curators that understand the context and the history of disability arts and having process which effectively incorporates access into the beginning stages of planning an exhibition rather than thinking of it as kind of an add on at the end.