Artists Challenging Normativity

<p>In this issue, we’re looking at how socially engaged artists are challenging mainstream habits of seeing and doing that exclude the lived experience and creative potential of large swaths of people who do not fit into—or rather, who have been systematically oppressed by—the social norms and physical expectations of capitalist society. Rather than view difference in negative terms, these artists are using their work to affirm physical, sensory, emotional, and cognitive difference as “to be expected and respected on its own terms as part of ordinary human experience,” as Colin Cameron wrote in a 2001 article on Disability Arts that we are reprinting in this issue. Our goal is to highlight how socially engaged art can reframe the disabling gaze of normative society towards an exploration of the liberatory possibilities of those at the so-called “margins”—both as affirmations of their own creativity and wisdom, and as strategies for transforming societies to become more just and inclusive.</p> <p>Issue #3 begins with Philadelphia-based artist and social worker Ras Cutlass, who writes poignantly about the ways her community’s experience of violent structures such as psychiatric institutions and foster care led her to develop the concept of a “mind space” as a visualization of the psychic self. She has since developed workshops using science fiction and Afrofuturistic creative processes to help people learn how to accept their own mental structures, regardless of the characterization or stigma they receive in the mainstream world…</p>