Alexandra Abbatiello

Alice Wexler

This article addresses a need of increasing importance: adolescents with disabilities have few opportunities to come to terms with illness and the isolation it often brings. This need is particularly urgent for children in America's inner cities, where poverty and lack of resources further exacerbates illness and isolation. The article describes how the Harlem Horizon Art Studio (HHAS) addresses these needs with an approach to painting with young people that falls between art education and art therapy. The purpose of this article is to help art educators reach this population more effectively by examining how adolescents find solutions to both artistic and physical problems with minimal intervention. Two case studies are offered as examples of what youngsters at HHAS experience as significant change as they challenge their daily obstacles by making art.

John Derby

This article promotes the field of disability studies as a valuable resource for expanding Art Education's concept of disability and as a promising venue for interdisciplinary dialogue. While art education has persistently supported special education since it's inception, disability advocacy has advanced in the past two decades towards self-awareness, self-reliance, and self-expression. The article demonstrates how disability studies, as the academic manifestation of this trend, can critically elaborate disability discourses in art education, such as those which espouse special education and the uncritical use of pejorative disability metaphors. The article concludes by exploring possibilities for art education researchers to contribute to disability studies and to collaborate on research as an interdisciplinary project to advance both fields.

Jennifer Eisenhauer

This article advocates for art curriculum to be guided by the goal of challenging the discrimination, stigmatization, marginalization, and medicalization of disabled people. The Disability Arts Movement provides an important site through which to engage students in exploring the sociopolitical issue ofableism in art curriculum. The pedagogical strategies of disability performance artists Carrie Sandahl, Mary Duffy, and Petra Kuppers are examined for the purposes of establishing an affirmative model that focuses upon the cultural contributions of disabled people rather than an orientation that focuses upon individual functional limitations. It is suggested that the strategies of critical appropriation and autobiography used by these artists offer ways through which to conceptualize disability as a sociopolitical issue in art curriculum. In its conclusions, this article suggests that an integration of the sociopolitical orientation and affirmative model of disability in the classroom be employed guided by the important work of the Disability Arts Movement in order to challenge ableist ideologies.