‘Disabling’ the museum: Curator as infrastructural activist

ABSTRACT

This article will explore how I attempt to ‘disable’ the museum through my infrastructural curatorial practice, which is the basis for my scholarly research and writing. By infusing my curatorial projects with critical reflection and theoretical development, I hope to begin this process of building a new vocabulary and methodology around curating disability and access. Specifically, I will focus on the exhibitions and related projects I have initiated and organized in the past three years to demonstrate a number of critical issues surrounding ‘curating disability’. These issues include incorporating discursive programming, establishing access as a creative methodology, taking a sensitive approach towards curating complex attitudes about disability and language, and maintaining sustained engagement with the ethics and practicalities of curating disability-related subject matter. I argue that part of the decolonizing work of disability studies is for curators to start practicing these curatorial strategies in order to ‘crip’ art history and the mainstream contemporary art world.

KEYWORDS:

• disability exhibitions
• curatorial practice
• contemporary art
• identity politics
• infrastructural activist
• museum access