Jo and collaborator Jane Fox worked together to realise two recent ACE funded exhibitions with Phoenix Art Space, Brighton, UK: Towards Inclusion and Art By Johnny: Exploring Inclusive Curation. Both exhibitions were designed to celebrate the diverse skills of learning disabled and neurodivergent artists whilst gently challenging public assumptions and shifting the dial for arts organisations seeking opportunities to review their inclusion and access programmes and policies.
This project provided an important opportunity to contribute to the debate that artists with learning disabilities have credible and valid insights and expertise to offer. It aimed to throw light on the shifting role of the collaborative artist within supported studios as dynamic, listening and socially engaged. The exhibition realised two aims: To celebrate the creativity of artist Johnny Carroll Pell and to present the collaborative journey and processes that learning-disabled and neurodivergent Rocket Artists explored in curating the show. The team documented and reflected on their explorations, asked questions, provoked and negotiated, made observations and devised creative responses to their experiences. In exploring what it is like to be artists charged with making decisions about the artworks of another, the group were able to reflect on what individual artists bring in order to collaborate and move forward with integrity.
Jo and Jane made a book about the process, see this short film which flicks through the book, here:
The exhibition was held at the Phoenix Art Space in Brighton 2018 www.phoenixbrighton.org
Go to www.disabilityarts.online/magazine to read about the process a team of learning disabled, neurodivergent, neurotypical artists took in curating the Arts Council England funded exhibition.
#artanddesign #diversity #inclusion #access #education