The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art Institutional Critique [Hardcover]

The Agency of Accessexamines how access can be employed as a methodology for curating art exhibitions using a multi-sensorial approach. Crip curator and art historian Amanda Cachia illustrates how bodies take in information and process stimuli, making the inequities in museums and galleries more transparent. She also argues that, as contemporary disabled artists move away from representations of disability, they create an art of access, or access aesthetics, through works that center translation, sensory expansion, touch, and movement for audiences and offer an experience of “being with” disability.

Showcasing artwork by contemporary disabled artists Corban Walker, Christine Sun Kim, and Carmen Papalia, among others,The Agency of Accessinscribes contemporary disability art in the broad canon of contemporary art, where the artistic past is regarded differently.

Cachia is an outspoken advocate for artists living with sensory disabilities. She understands disabled artists’ experiences in both the world and the gallery. The artists she has curated make bold, astonishing, and compelling statements about interdependency, care, and the ways in which our environment affects disabled, ill, and immunocompromised bodies.

Drawing from her own experiences as a scholar, professor, and curator with dwarfism enables [Cachia] to experience aesthetics differently: the chapters focus on the work of artists and people with disabilities as well as on institutional critique as a medium....The Agency of Accesswill be of interest to those studying art, contemporary art, art history, museum studies, disability studies, intersectionality, and curatorial studies. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Choice

The Agency of Accessis a comprehensive book about the artistic and curatorial movement to de-normalize art institutions.... [Cachia's] book fills the gaps in the limited but growing scholarshlC,