Lectures in Art History: Amanda Cachia, Arizona State University

Art, Health, Equity Series

“Access, Activism, and Aesthetic Revision: Crip Methods for Art History”

This talk brings together the core arguments of The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique (2024), Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism (2025) and Rehabilitating the Asylum: Mental Health Justice and Contemporary Art (2027) to demonstrate that disability is not peripheral to canonical art; instead, it is one of its most generative methodological engines to arise with the canon of 20th-century art history. Across these three books, Amanda Cachia develops what she calls a critical-aesthetic approach to access, care and confinement, tracing how hospitals, asylums and contemporary art institutions function as overlapping architectures of power, creativity and resistance. Moving between art history, disability studies, medical humanities, institutional critique and the activist strategies of contemporary disability artists, Cachia shows how access operates as an artistic medium and how care becomes an aesthetic category. By centering disability as both method and material, she proposes an art history that is structurally transformed by the politics and poetics of access, and how pertinent historical artworks and movements can be reconfigured based on a crip revision.

Amanda Cachia is Professor of Practice in Museum Studies in the School of Art at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University and affiliate faculty in the Disability Studies B.A. Her research interests include disability art history, theory and activism, crip curatorial practices and access aesthetics, museums, institutional critique and social justice, and critical disability approaches to translation, movement, medicine and health. Cachia is the author of three books: Rehabilitating the Asylum: Mental Health Justice and Contemporary Art (forthcoming 2027), Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism (2025) and The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique (2024), the latter of which was shortlisted for the College Art Association’s 2026 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. She is also editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (2022), which includes more than 40 international contributors. She is currently working on her fourth book project, Disability Art: A Political History. Since 2010, Cachia has organized 20 art exhibitions devoted to the work of disabled artists. She is currently developing the major touring exhibition Vital Signs: From Patient to Power with Mid-America Arts Alliance and ExhibitsUSA, which will be hosted by numerous galleries across the United States from 2027-32. Cachia is also a curatorial and disability adviser for a major exhibition being developed about art and disability from the 19th century to the present at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2028.