Tracing her trajectory from undergraduate to art world professional, Emily Watlington sheds light, through her encounters, experiences, and learning, on the development of a disability arts scene in the United States. This movement, which points to the potential of accessibility, is gradually reconfiguring cultural practices—by way of sustained efforts, but also thanks to a solidarity woven over different temporalities.
I first got caught up in disability arts during my freshman year of college, though I wouldn’t have called it “disability arts” back then, not yet. The way it happened was that I got quite sick, and it simply affected everything I did. It also showed up in all the art I was making long before I had the tools for understanding how or why this might matter. I was taking figure drawing classes, as art school students are wont to do, only for a doctor to tell me I could not use—never mind be around—charcoal for all the dust it produced, owing to allergies. So I enrolled in a more experimental drawing class and got an assignment: draw for 24 hours straight. I sewed instead, so that I might lie down and have a better shot at staying awake, but fell asleep anyway. Between classes, I charted circuitous routes around my campus to avoid stairs. In the process, I was exploring the school’s all but abandoned crevices few of my classmates knew existed.
I was, I now realize, getting creative and adapting—as artists and disabled people alike always do. Yet I was unconvinced by, even resentful of, the art that I was making, bitter especially toward the ways critiques inevitably turned into a conversation about me, one laced with pity that danced delicately around instead of earnestly critiquing. It felt like a dead end. My teachers and classmates were very accommodating and hardly unkind—I realize now that I was lucky—but this was simply not an interesting or enjoyable conversation on my part, and not what I wanted my art to do.
As years went by, the conversations in many ways got worse. When I first received my diagnosis, Lyme disease, it was still uncommon. I was fortunate that my doctor even thought to check, even if I had only been able to go to her at quite a late stage, when I was struggling to walk, because I had been uninsured. But soon, cases would skyrocket and Lyme disease would get caught up in the culture wars and become controversial. More on that soon.
In the interim, I came to learn about disability arts as a burgeoning field while working as a curatorial assistant at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, where I collaborated with two artists whose work impacted me greatly: Park McArthur and Eduardo Andrés Crespo. Both made work that pointed to the ways in which disability is socially, politically, and economically produced, which for me was nothing short of a revelation.
Crespo exhibited [intensifies] (2016), an hour-long video following Alan, an autistic character loosely based on the artist, as he navigates memes and online discourse laden with sensationalized fear of autism. These reactionary responses exacerbate stigma and leave Alan lonely. He finds solace in drawing and in machines, only for his interests to be judged as cold, dead, and inhuman—and so he finds himself in an ableist feedback loop. McArthur, meanwhile, had just premiered her landmark exhibition “Ramps,” a galvanizing show that made people in the art world aware of how long, and how thoroughly, they had overlooked disability and accessibility. At the Lower Manhattan gallery Essex Street, McArthur displayed ramps that various art institutions had improvised to welcome her. Many of them—opened before the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act required ramps in public spaces—were inaccessible because their entryways sat above street level, so their staff devised makeshift solutions. The resulting ramps employed unlikely materials ranging from laminated cardboard to a cabinet door. They indexed acts of interpersonal care and systemic neglect simultaneously. Pointing to the latter, to the ways ableism is systemic, McArthur included on the wall a link to the Wikipedia page introducing Marta Russell, the activist author of Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract (2002). This essential read details how the neoliberal drive to shrink social services can be as disabling as physical impairment, if not more.
Disability was constantly on my mind already for all the time-consuming labor that comes with being ill and navigating an ableist world. Through cross-disability solidarity, this labor now had meaning and urgency beyond the tedious sustaining of biotic life: there were social stakes too, not solely individual or biomedical ones.
All the while, I was moving away from practicing as an artist and toward working as a critic and curator. By 2018, I was editing an issue of Art Papers on disability and the politics of visibility, with input from many artists and thinkers. In it, Amalle Dublon, Constantina Zavitsanos, and Park McArthur discuss using access as an artistic material. We had contributions from artists I think of as elders, like Riva Lehrer and Joseph Grigely, who made artworks from and about disability before disabled people were even guaranteed basic education in the United States. And a conversation between Zavitsanos, Mara Mills, and Rebecca Sanchez considered disability in relationship to debt and dependency, as well as the ways capitalism produces and exacerbates impairment. It was a tremendous privilege to learn more from and collaborate with such thoughtful people, many of whom remain important in my work and my life. And it was a chance to share the language and community around disability arts that had been so meaningful and essential for me.
Art and writing, I came to see, can facilitate asynchronous solidarity or community: how nice it is to know that someone somewhere cares about disability, too, whether or not you can or want to be in the same room. With disability community especially, showing up is not always possible; asynchronicity as access is key. The Art Papers issue also felt like a first draft, a marker in time. Disability arts was by no means new, even if it hadn’t been part of my art world or art education and was therefore new to me and many others. The movement was growing fast, and I learned a lot. My biggest regret was naming my diagnosis, or one of them, in my editor’s letter. On some level, I felt that I had to, that medicalized language was required to show that I am disabled—or, disabled enough. But soon, stigma shifted and I would see people I know sharing articles about Lyme being a scam or a hoax, with stories of whiny white women paying dubious doctors big bucks for a diagnosis to explain their pain, and even excuse bad behavior. (The disease’s association with whiteness arguably correlates with whose pain gets taken seriously enough to warrant diagnoses and drugs—a phenomenon evoked poignantly in Carolyn Lazard’s 2019 Pain Scale.) Conspiracies abounded, too, due to its association with climate change as a tick-borne illness, and to the timing of its spread, which coincided with growing numbers of people using the internet to do their own medical research if not self-diagnose. I wanted no association with these stereotypes, and no citizen scientist’s medical opinions. When I got my diagnosis, it had been uncontroversial: a simple blood test, yes or no. But things changed, and I knew that people were googling me and reading my editor’s letter to find out whether I was disabled, and in what way, because they told me so. They did not tell me whether they had opinions about Lyme, but this was a time when many people did. And there are so many diagnoses that have it much worse.
Now, the media mayhem has died down, and everyone I know in the Northeast United States checks themselves diligently for ticks; everyone I know knows someone who has had the disease. But stigma happens, it seems, when a virus begins spreading, and society projects its ugliest moral views onto microscopic organisms who could really care less. AIDS got a reputation as gay cancer, god’s wrath; Covid exacerbated anti-Asian hatred; ME/CFS has been dismissed as yuppie flu. Which is all to say that medicalized language begets stigma and silos, pseudo-science and/or pity. It also places the experience of disability entirely on an individual’s biomedical experience, when reality is much messier, when barriers are as if not more disabling than bodies. My visual impairment, for instance, would hardly be disabling if standard font faces and sizes were otherwise; in this case, the standard size is the barrier. Dismantling barriers—enabling access—is what we mean when we talk about a politicized approach to disability.
Access would be the focus of the next phase of my work: my writing advocated for access, but also framed access as artistry. The two always went hand-in-hand. I wrote an essay about artists using closed captions as a creative medium (including Christine Sun Kim, Grigely, Lazard, Zavitsanos, and Liza Sylvestre). And soon I wondered: why is video art, when shown in museums, so rarely captioned? I wrote about why this move was ahistorical, about how so many video artists turned to the medium for its radical accessibility, only for museums to absorb them in the most rigid and inaccessible ways.1 I also wrote about exemplary museum access programs incorporating visual description into their collections and exhibitions.2 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for instance, collects various visual descriptions, then combines them into one, acknowledging that with artworks, different aspects stand out to different people, and attempting to split the difference. For a Mika Rottenberg exhibition at the MCA Chicago, curator Bana Kattan included exemplary audio description tracks for work that defies ekphrasis.3 I highlighted these examples in the hope that they might inspire others to follow suit, or offer new approaches.
Momentum built, and I tried to put in writing the work and ideas of colleagues, comrades, and friends, in hopes of making everything accessible and helping it all proliferate. I tried to write in ways that are clear and straightforward but not boring and dry, thinking of my role as translating the innovative world of disability arts into relatable, digestible, and shareable terms, so that they might have legs, and find those who need them, as well as those with the power to change things. It helped that I got a job at a magazine with some authority, as soon, friends and colleagues were telling me that pointing to my articles helped them get grants, or win an argument over access with their boss. This delighted me: when I worked in museums, I made some arguments for access like those I was making in print, including about strobe warnings, which I myself require, but to no avail. I was the same person making the same points, but this time in print, which I suppose has more heft than doing so as a low-ranking employee. I came to see the power of writing things down and making them public.
Meanwhile, work by disabled artists was gaining momentum. Christine Sun Kim and Carolyn Lazard were included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and there has been at least one disability justice-aligned artist in each edition since. Lazard was recognized with a McArthur “Genius” Grant in 2023, and Kim was asked to sign the ASL at the 2020 Super Bowl before staging a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2025. Soon, I found that if I said I wrote about disability arts in casual conversation, people didn’t automatically assume that I was referring to self-taught, institutionalized artists; they saw that we worked not only on the margins, but in the center, too.
As a result of these and other artists’ advocacy, it became harder for museums and other arts organizations to pretend that disabled people were not part of their audience or community. I know of many curators whose perspectives were changed through working with a disabled artist, whether the experience made them more committed to access or helped them see themselves as disabled—a word that, in the US at least, most people were raised to believe best avoided.
And then came the pandemic. Everyone had to figure out access, or else simply stop what they were doing. Those in the disability arts community were in many ways well prepared, even called upon and listened to. Those with good intentions readily welcomed a checklist, an access how-to, to ensure compliance. Disappointing news: there is no one-size-fits-all set of guidelines. At its best, access is much richer. I remember attending Critical Design Lab’s Remote Access Parties—come-as-you-are gatherings to dance and socialize, one of few Zoom convenings that actually felt fun, because here, access was not a chore, it was an art. It was not an afterthought, tacked on at the end, but part of the very fabric of the event. This is not to say that American society suddenly valued the perspectives of disabled people once and for all. If you had a chronic condition, it was now much harder to get care or medicine. People of various political persuasions advocated returning to normal, even if the cost was that higher-risk individuals would die. Nevertheless, all the norms of daily life had been upended, and there was exciting talk of how society might change forever. We showed the world that we can adapt and prioritize access and health.
Soon, though, it seemed as if the majority wanted to forget the pandemic ever happened. Certainly, it was a difficult time for almost everyone, with all the uncertainty, isolation, death, and doom. Slowly but surely, things went back to normal, though not for everyone. But before long, all this promise of permanent change slowly dissipated. It was alarming to see how quickly people stopped staying home when they had a cough or cold, and that employers returned readily to restrictive sick policies, even after we proved remote work can work. When pro-Palestine protests broke out in New York, and after a masked man shot and killed the CEO of a health insurance company, the governor nearly banned the wearing of masks on subways, claiming crime prevention.
So much ableism comes, I think, from wanting to ignore the fact that we are vulnerable sacks of flesh and bones. This in turn becomes something repressed, something that we transfer onto our other moral and political anxieties. It comes from wanting to believe one can avoid death and disability, which, as we know, isn’t true.
I do think the fundamental mainstream understanding of access and disability is better than it was ten years ago, in both the art world and more generally. But I honestly find it hard and disheartening to advocate for access now: in New York at least, given all that we went through during the pandemic, a lack of effort cannot be due to a lack of information. I don’t know whether more writing would help. And, good grief, is it demoralizing to have to ask for the same things again and again. For one, I have lost count of how many events I have tried to go to post-pandemic only to find that they had strobes that no one warned me about. And I don’t think people do not know that strobes can have severe negative impacts, as this is common knowledge, but rather I suspect that they do not expect those disabled people to be interested in art, never mind be art critics.
This perception that disabled people are not artists or interested in art is not only incredibly ableist, but woefully ahistorical. My job at an art magazine has required that I be something of a generalist, keeping up with artists and movements of all stripes. In the process, I have noticed just how many canonical artists have been disabled, their disability often directly impacting their work. It could even be said that this is more the rule than the exception. So at the moment, I am working on a book about various artists who went blind and whose visual impairments shaped their contributions to art history, including Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Derek Jarman. The book is about the inherent creativity that comes with being disabled: something that plenty of others, notably Aimi Hamraie,4 Mara Mills,5 and Sara Hendren,6 have noted in the fields of technology and design. But I crave proving that disabled people are not making marginal or niche contributions to art. Instead, we have long been at the center, in the canon, shaping the course of art history.
The issue of access goes much deeper than whether people understand access best practices or not. It matters how the world conceives of disabled people. Language matters: framing these famous artists as disabled is a political act, even if the claim here is matter-of-fact, and once again, I am simply writing it down.
FOOTNOTES
1. Emily Watlington, “Critical Creative Corrective Cacophonous Comical: Closed Captions,” available online: moussemagazine.it/magazine/critical-creative-corrective-
cacophonous-comical-closed-captions-emily-watlington-2019
2. Emily Watlington, “The Radical Accessibility of Video Art (for Hearing People),” in Future Anterior, Vol. 16, No. 1, Summer 2019, 111–121.
3. Available on MCA Chicago’s website: www.mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/2019/Mika-Rottenberg-Easypieces/Described-Media/No-Nose-Knows
4. Aimi Hamraie is a design researcher, the Canada Research Chair in Technology, Society, and Disability, and Associate Professor of Social Science at York University. They are the author of Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), and the host of the Contra* podcast on disability and design.
5. Mara Mills is an interdisciplinary scholar and trained in biology, literature, and the history of science. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and cofounder and director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies. She is the editor of the books How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic (New York: NYU Press, 2025), Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (New York: NYU Press, 2025), and Testing Hearing: The Making of Aurality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
6. Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Northeastern University. Her book What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World (New York: Riverhead/Penguin Random House, 2020) explores design for disability at all scales: products, furniture, architecture, planning, and more.
BIOGRAPHY
EMILY WATLINGTON is a critic, curator, and senior editor at Art in America. Her writing often focuses on disability culture, feminism, and those places where art and science meet. She is a Fulbright scholar with a master’s degree from MIT in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture and art. She guest edited the winter 2018/2019 Art Papers issue “Disability and the Politics of Visibility,” as well as the October 2023 Art in America issue on disability culture.