Gloria C Swain.

Gloria C. Swain is a multidisciplinary female artist, activist, and seniors’ rights and mental health advocate working out of Toronto. She works within the mediums of installation, painting, performance, and photography to challenge systemic oppression against Black women and trans folks.

 

Website – glcarissa.tumblr.com/

 

Race, Sex, Age and Disability.

Conversations and organizations within the mainstream art world do not typically include access and inclusion for disabled artists. As an aging Black woman artist with a mental disability, I have personally, encountered such barriers as inaccessibility of art education and training, inadequate resources and support, and the lack of welcoming spaces for disability and Mad aesthetics. Tangled Art + Disability is a non-profit organization in Toronto, Ontario that has been cultivating disability art in Ontario since 2003 by supporting the work of disability, Deaf, and Mad-identified artists through professional development workshops and holding cost-free and accessible disability art programming.

 

In 2016, Tangled opened the Tangled Art Gallery (TAG), Canada’s first art gallery dedicated to showcasing disability, Deaf, and Mad art and advancing accessible curatorial practices. All of TAG’s exhibitions and programming offers audio description, American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation, and personal support workers. All of their events are wheelchair accessible, they welcome service animals, and the art is hung at accessible levels. These practices, which are in no way common practices in mainstream galleries centred on white, cis-male, non-disabled subjects, are important for the way that they centre disabled, Deaf, and Mad artists and audiences.

 

In 2016, I was the Sharon Wolfe Artist-in-Residence at Tangled Art & Disability, which was an opportunity that increased my own understanding of disability and the definition of Mad art. In this residency, I created over 50 paintings to fill the Tangled Gallery for my solo exhibition. In the exhibition’s title, I use the term ‘mad’ in a Foucauldian sense to refer to how anti-Black racism impacts my mental health.

 

I spent two and half months and over three hundred hours working on my art exhibition titled, Mad Room. The paintings featured mixtures of vibrant textured shapes and colours that created a relaxing environment and all the paintings were ‘touchable’ which allowed people to embrace the work. Along with the paintings, this exhibit had a bed containing two blank canvases and a white textured mask with blue eyes, a monitor featuring the artist statement with visuals, a small table with re-labelled empty pill bottles and a coat hook with white clothing hanging on it.

 

My artist statement was in the form of a short video which was closed captioned. The artwork was divided into sections: healing space, stigmas, traumatic, perseverance, demeanour, secrets, violence and mental disability sharing my journey with depression and anti-Black racism.The whole exhibition was audio described.

 

As a disabled, Mad Black female artist whose experience has taught me that art can be a refuge from the intense emotions associated with illness, disability and disablement, I feel it is important to share opportunities, resources and space in the healing process.

 

Disability arts allow an outlet for my pain and I can share lived experiences with other Black women. And so, along with being an art exhibition, I wanted Mad Room to be a community space by and for other Black women to talk about mental disability. This began during my residency as I invited other Black artists to visit me in my studio. In these visits, I showed these artists my work-in-progress and they could give me feedback. This also gave me the opportunity to introduce these artists to Tangled. Throughout it all, I could use my art-making space to open up opportunities for often-quieted conversations about mental health disabilities in Black communities and the connection between madness, colonialism, intergenerational trauma, and state-sanctioned anti-Black racism, like police brutality. These conversations continued after the exhibition as I held 16 (true!) artist talks—an unprecedented number of artists talks at Tangled.

 

Many of these artist talks created space for my community to talk about the experience of madness in Black communities. This was also an opportunity for me to disrupt the ‘strong Black woman’ trope and focus on healing from intergenerational trauma.

 

Sharing my story through disability arts opened up conversations wherein people could speak freely about their own struggles with racism, ableism and how these systems of oppression intersect with and amplify experiences with mental health disabilities. Mad Room represented madness differently than it is represented in mainstream culture. Disability arts continue to create community, raise political consciousness and bring action to social issues. I continue to have these conversations today with other Black women through my art.

 

The full article, The Healing Power of Art, can be found at cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/article/view/469/711.