Curating This Collection

This chapter serves as an introduction to The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art second edition. It provides background on disability studies, as political and social movements for equal rights and recognition for people with varying disabilities, as academic disciplines, and as creative acts and productions for which people with disabilities represent themselves and their communities. I include the names of interdisciplinary disability studies and art history/visual studies books published and briefly describe a selection of exhibitions of the work of artists with disabilities held since the first edition of this book in 2010. I revisit the work of key scholars such as Lennard J. Davis, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Petra Kuppers and summarize the following seven chapters of this book.