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Posts Tagged ‘inclusion’

Radical Access to the Arts

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 5, 2026| 2 Comments »

Photo: Mahla Karimian/ArtsHub.
The launch of Diversity Arts Australia’s Fair Play: Equity, Inclusion and the Creative Industries report. Australia supports concepts like diversity, equity, and inclusion.

When I was around seven or eight, I hadn’t had the advantage of being around any children with a disability and didn’t know how to relate to a girl in Sunday school who had a condition like cerebral palsy. I was ignorant. Why did that girl walk like that? Why did she talk so slowly? I felt uncomfortable, and it never occurred to me to wonder how she herself felt about things.

Maybe she liked the same books I liked. Maybe she watched the same tv shows. I never found out. The best I can say for my benighted self is I was horrified when the minister’s daughter made mean comments. Time, experience, and knowing more kinds of people make a big difference.

Today people with different abilities are organizing. From the following report, we learn that creatives with disabilities are making change in Australia.

Sarah-Mace Dennis wrote in March at ArtsHub, “Between 2023 and 2024, the cultural and creative industries contributed $67.4 billion to the Australian economy. Proportionally, audiences with disability attend the arts as much as non-disabled audiences. This means that making these industries accessible for the more than 20% of our population who identify as disabled is an economic imperative. But what will it take to make Australia’s arts and cultural sector truly accessible?

“Established in 2022, the Access Fringe program at the Melbourne Fringe Festival is a 10-year partnership with Arts Access Victoria supporting d/Deaf and disabled artists through commissions, mentorships and specialized development programs. The initiative shows how embedding access into every space and conversation can lead to change across the entire cultural sector.

“At last year’s Access Fringe, Cultural Equity Consultant Caroline Bowditch hosted talks with national and international industry speakers about ‘radical access.’ As she said, ‘Radical Access imagines a radical version of best practice accessibility for the independent arts sector. It moves the conversation beyond the provision of access services into a space of cultural equity.’

“Reimagining ableist practices means understanding the effects of our everyday habitual behaviors and approaching our work with curiosity and care for how we might work together to create change. What becomes possible when we create space for bodies that think and move in different ways?

“Last month’s launch of Diversity Arts Australia’s Fair Play: Equity, Inclusion and the Creative Industries report at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre shows how sustained, behind-the-scenes work to shift equity and access across the creative industries can create important structural changes.

“The Fair Play program was developed in 2019 to address systemic exclusion in the creative industries for First Nations people, d/Deaf and Disabled people, and artists and arts workers from underrepresented culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Since its launch, it has grown into a national program that supports organizations to unlearn the systemic biases that no longer serve our communities or our creative sector.

“Reaching more than 75 organizations and over 2000 participants through training, mentoring and sector conversations, Fair Play is proof that long-term collaboration and shared learning can ensure that diversity, accessibility and inclusion become an integral part of organizational thinking.

“Speaking at the launch of the report, Fair Play trainer and mentor Kochava Lilit said: ‘A lot of disability justice practices benefit everyone. For people who are tired, who need flexible working arrangements because they are parenting, caring or living with disability and chronic illness.’

“Last year’s Art, Access and the Digital Now symposium at the Fremantle Biennale brought together world leading artists and arts organizations to discuss whether digital technologies such as artificial intelligence are tools for inclusion or exclusion.

“Although the unanimous undercurrent at the symposium was to exercise caution when it came to machine vision, there were many examples of using technology for good too. A clear standout was Scottish dance company Indepen-dance and their use of online and digital tools to enhance accessibility for disabled performers. Another example came from Nat Lim, Director of Singapore’s A11YVerse, who runs a living lab where technology provides opportunities for diverse communities to experiment with new approaches to work and learning.

“Examples like these show that for technology to be accessible, it must be introduced and developed in collaboration with communities – testing, adapting and asking: ‘does this work for you?’ …

“Disability, inclusion and equity consultant Morwenna Collett has devoted much of her career to examining best practice approaches and implementing systems to make creative experiences more accessible. With the support of a Churchill Fellowship and Music Australia, she has travelled the world researching how music festivals and cultural organizations are making real change when it comes to accessibility.

“When I asked Collett how the creative community can work together to make the future more accessible for all Australians she said: ‘I believe we all need to just jump in and start somewhere, seek regular feedback, plan for improvements and connect with each other to keep learning.’ “

Many more examples at ArtsHub, here. No firewall.

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Be a Guest Art Critic

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on August 24, 2019| 5 Comments »

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Photo: Jay Simple
Artist Maia Chao pays a guest critic $75 in cash at the end of a 4-hour visit to the Rhode Island School of Design Museum.

The Rhode Island School of Design and its museum are justly famed for cutting-edge art and ideas. In this Hypoallergic story, Laura Raicovich speaks with Maia Chao and Josephine Devanbu, the founders of Look at Art. Get Paid., a program that pays people who wouldn’t otherwise visit art museums to visit one as guest critics. It premiered at RISD.

“Critique is a hallmark of the art field,” writes Raicovich, “yet the vast majority of cultural critics, curators, museum leadership, and museum visitors are affluent and white. What is critique without diversity? What possibilities and truths are we missing?

“I was fortunate to meet artists Maia Chao and Josephine Devanbu, who launched the pilot of an ingenious way to approach these questions called Look at Art. Get Paid. (LAAGP), in 2016 at the RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] Museum. The initiative is a socially engaged art project that pays people who wouldn’t otherwise visit art museums to visit one as guest critics of the art and the institution, flipping the script between the institution and its public, the educator and the educated, the paying and the paid. In the next year, they will embark on an expanded campaign to launch LAAGP simultaneously across a regional cohort of three to five art museums in the US. …

“Hyperallergic: What is the origin story of LAAGP?

“LAAGP: We started LAAGP when we were both students at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). We were grappling with the relevance of our chosen field to our wider communities. We believed in art making and cultural critique as vital sites of collective meaning-making and world-building, but felt frustrated by how access to the majority of resources and infrastructure to sustain ambitious projects was constrained to a (mostly white and affluent) initiated few. We asked each other, what would a critique environment look like if you didn’t need to be an insider to be in the room? We were curious to test out how we might use our institutional access and artistic license to move funds that would normally circulate within RISD out into the community. We launched our pilot in 2016 at the RISD Museum. …

“Paying people in cash to visit a museum names the elephant in the room: wealth, specifically the wealth accumulated by beneficiaries of the transatlantic slave trade, and the way this wealth continues to shape whose cultural production gets prioritized.

“As with any group of people, some enjoyed their experience and others didn’t. One critic took a picture of her favorite painting on her phone to get printed at Walgreens and hang it up in her living room. Others found the experience reaffirmed their assumptions that museums are boring.

“But beyond like and dislike of the experience, there was a general feeling amongst critics that the museum is ‘addressing a certain kind of person’ — namely white people and people with money. Throughout our conversations, the topic of belonging featured prominently, and one critic said, ‘maybe this place isn’t for me.’ Another critic articulated that they just didn’t feel like they had ‘bandwidth for another white space.’ When discussing what changes the critics would like to see, most agreed the museum would have to better represent POC [people of color] in their collection, improve language accessibility, advertise in their neighborhoods, and make the experience less intimidating.

“However, there were some critics who felt energized to help the museum. For instance, one critic, a sign-maker, said he’d love to help the museum improve their signage. Another critic — an organizer from Direct Action for Rights and Equality — suggested having cookouts at the museum. We’ve been working with these critics to commission local artists to engage these ideas. …

“Critic Samanda Martínez said, ‘Están cuidando más a las imágenes que a nosotros/They’re taking better care of the paintings than they are of us.’

“It’s one thing to know that a space isn’t welcoming to another person, but it’s another to hear directly from someone who has felt unwelcome. In general, our goal as artists is to make that experience legible and valid, in order to create more urgency and disrupt usual practices that need to change. ” More here.

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