“A whole new generation of disability art has blossomed”: Professor Amanda Cachia on her National Arts and Disability Award (Established)

Curator, scholar and activist Amanda Cachia – the recipient of the 2024 National Arts and Disability Award (Established) – has curated 17 exhibitions and written over 70 academic articles in her speciality area of disability arts activism and its intersections.

Installation shots of Smoke & Mirrors exhibition at Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, curated by Amanda Cachia.

Cachia was born in Wollongong with a rare form of dwarfism named brachyolmia. She grew up in Sydney, earned her PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism from the University of California in San Diego, and is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston.

Her curatorial and academic practice centres around themes central to disability arts, disability studies, and art history in general, including investigating ideas such as crip time, crip ecologies, and accessibility – debunking stereotypes of disabled embodiment, and empowering disabled bodies by recentring their appearance within visual culture. You can read about all these concepts in the extensive bibliography on her website.

We spoke with Amanda about receiving the National Arts and Disability Award, her extensive curatorial history, some of the academic concepts she works with, and what’s coming next.

^{Photo credit: Amanda Cachia}

Amanda, what does it mean to you to receive an Established artist National Arts and Disability Award from Creative Australia?

“It’s a thrill and a privilege. It’s also very encouraging and exciting to see how disability art is being robustly supported by the Australian government. It really validates all my hard work over the years, and it feels amazing to be recognised by my peers for my contributions to the field.”

Of the many exhibitions you’ve curated over your career, is there one that stands out as being especially pivotal or memorable?

“Yes, I curated “What Can a Body Do?” at Haverford College in Pennsylvania in 2012 and it was a pivotal and memorable exhibition because it really felt like the beginning of an era of a whole new generation of contemporary disability art. It was the second show I had curated on disability art and I was so excited to explore this new terrain.

“The exhibition was based on my Masters thesis, which I had completed at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco that same year. There were many exceptional disabled artists in that show who have now gone on to achieve world-wide acclaim and success, particularly Christine Sun Kim, Park McArthur and Carmen Papalia.

“Christine Sun Kim is having her first major solo exhibition in Spring 2025 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which is an outstanding accomplishment. I was very proud of that exhibition and the artists I was presenting because it was a time when still so little disability art was on display in art museums.

In the 12 years since that exhibition was organised, a whole new generation of disability art has blossomed all around the world, and it is very satisfying to see this progress and transformation in the art world.

Installation of Smoke & Mirrors exhibition at Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, curated by Amanda Cachia.

Who are your favourite artists at the moment/who has been consuming your attention?

“I have many favourite artists, but I especially enjoy the work of the artists in my forthcoming books, particularly British artist Jesse Darling, who recently won the Turner Prize in the UK, Irish artist Corban Walker, who has inspired my thinking about disability art from the very beginning, and US-based artist Finnegan Shannon, whose work has really provided a solid intervention in institutional critique from a disabled perspective.

“Two Canadian artists that have more recently come to my attention that I think are very exciting include Sharona Franklin and Lauryn Youden. In Australia, I think Fayen d’Evie’s work is pioneering for its haptic activism. I also love the work of vacuum cleaner, who is an artist based in the UK who thinks about mental health.

“The work of artist Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen is also fantastic – she just represented the Finnish Pavilion in the 60^th Venice Biennale, and her representation as a disabled artist in a national pavilion is ground-breaking.”

You’ve written about the ‘aesthetics of the undeliverable’; can you explain briefly what this is?

“This is the idea that aesthetics can fold in the concept of crip time. In other words, it is a disabled approach to aesthetics that refutes the logic of capitalism in many ways, because there is a necessary rejection of the normative clock. Time necessarily slows down for disabled people, either because of how their body moves differently or because of the built environment that doesn’t cater to disabled people’s bodies.”

So an aesthetics of the undeliverable is where art takes crip time into consideration.

“A good example might be how we can push up against, and challenge, the notion of a ‘finished’ or ‘complete’ artwork or exhibition. Aesthetics of the undeliverable suggests that we need to adjust our expectations of labour and productivity in application to the artworld, relieving us of the pressure and time constraints that we typically operate under.”

Installation of Smoke & Mirrors exhibition at Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, curated by Amanda Cachia.

The pandemic had the side effect of making many exhibitions and artworks more accessible, as they moved to or incorporated online streaming elements; you’ve written extensively on how cultural institutions can offer better modes of access; what are some of the key practices institutions can enact?

“In addition to more online access, which thankfully has been implemented more meaningfully around the world owing to the pandemic, I’ve always advocated for what I consider to be the foundational elements of access, such as large print labels, image descriptions, captions, braille labels, more seating and benches, ramps, accessible hang-height, more tactility and opportunities to engage sensorially with artwork.

But lately I have been advocating for the importance of museums to consult directly with disability community to represent their interests and their politics on the walls of the gallery itself.

“Along with hiring disabled artists as consultants to assist with exhibition design so that wayfinding in an exhibition becomes more attuned to the needs of disabled audiences. My forthcoming book discusses these ideas, particularly in the last chapter, Chapter Five.”

 

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You have a book coming out shortly, The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique, but what is next after that?

“Well, I have a second book coming out in September 2025, entitled Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism. I’m developing a new touring exhibition of disability art which hopefully will tour across the United States over the next three to five years. And I am working on a third book entitled Rehabilitating the Asylum: Mental Health Justice and Contemporary Art, which will likely be released in 2026 or 2027.

“I’d really love to be able to curate a large-scale and comprehensive contemporary disability art exhibition, either in Australia, the US, or Canada, where I can really demonstrate to audiences the incredible history of disability art. My dream is to curate the Australian national pavilion at the Venice Biennale with work by a disabled artist, and one day I believe it will happen!”

Amanda Cachia: Instagram | Website | National Arts and Disability Awards