About arcadea
This page tells you all about arcadea and our work with artists, with audiences, disability groups and with strategic regional and national partners. You can find out about the context within which we work and what our strategic aims are. We also provide some information about Disability Equality and Disability Arts.
- About Arcadea and Our Work
- Our Context
- Our Strategic Aims
- Disability Equality
- Disability Arts and Art by Disabled People
About Arcadea and Our Work
Based in Newcastle Upon Tyne and working across the whole North East England region, ARCADEA is an exciting part of new thinking in Art and Culture, and we work with some of the most innovative artists, thinkers and partners in the country. We are staffed and managed by Disabled people who have expertise in Disability Equality in Art and Culture, many of whom are practising artists and arts managers. Our work is wide reaching and we work with Disabled artists, audiences of Disabled people, the wider Disability Community and partners in the Art and Culture sectors.
Disabled Artists
Arcadea is a representative organisation working directly with Disabled artists
and groups in a range of ways. We have a Training
and Professional Development Programme which includes a mentoring scheme,
training courses, workshops and master classes. We also support a number of
artists’ networks and Disability Arts groups.
We have an Artistic Programme which includes developing opportunities for artists to create work, and to present their work. There is a successful programme of cabarets, theatre productions, artist residencies, commissions of new work, visual art exhibitions, informal presentations of work in development and our Mimosa Festival, as well as supporting a number of artists projects.
We also provide a range of information services for artists and the arts community, through our Information Programme including our web site; our on-line gallery promoting the work of artists across a range of art forms; our newsletter and magazine; and, we have an information resource area in our office base which people can book to use.
We collaborate with exciting progressive organisations and venues in the region to ensure that they programme the work of Disabled artists and consider the impact on the status of Disabled people of the Disability content within their own work. You can find out more about our work with artists on our Projects page.
Audiences
Whilst we do not work as access auditors, our expertise is in promoting wider
Disability Equality in arts venues and organisations, and in culture generally.
Access is only a part of Disability Equality
– an important and crucial part – but we work to promote understanding
of Disability Equality in its widest possible context. Part of our work in
our Regional Development Programme is specifically
aimed at audiences.
We create an artistic programme and present exhibitions, performances, cabarets, dance pieces, and public art among many other projects and we work towards building audiences of Disabled people. Disabled audiences face a number of barriers to attending arts events which are more complex than whether there is an accessible toilet or lift but are about the cultural welcome they receive and about the representation of Disabled people in the art that they see.
And of course, we’re not saying that Disabled people only want to see work by and about Disabled people, but we are saying that our cultural identities as Disabled people need to have a presence, a visibility in the Art and Culture landscape. We work with organisations and venues to improve Disabled people’s experiences and to promote an understanding of what exactly Disability Equality is, and how to achieve it from an audience’s perspective.
Disability Groups and the Disability
Community
Arcadea works with a number of Disability Groups and individuals within the
Disability Community to develop the role of Art and Culture in achieving Disability
Equality in our region. We see Disabled people’s status as intrinsically
linked to how we are presented in Art and Culture - eg in literature, film,
theatre, media, visual art and in museum collection contexts - and feel strongly
that it is also one of the major routes from unequal status to equal status.
We work with groups to share the history and identity of Disabled people in the North East, and we look at how Art and Culture can create change. We give talks, run projects and invite groups to see the work of Disabled artists. From 2008-2011 a significant strand of our MIMOSA PROJECT is dedicated to Giant Leap. Giant Leap is a cohesive approach to developing aspects of the Disability Community at local and regional level. We will be working on a number of community development and social enterprise projects so that local Disabled people can become more actively involved in local communities – as community leaders, as community advisors, as voices representing Disabled people at community level.
Arcadea will be working with a number of artists and a number of groups, using the arts as a tool of change, to both support our community development at local level, to support Disabled people to organise their own groups and projects and to be an equal part of community life – eg community festivals, community interest organisations, local development.
The project aims to ensure that decisions affecting Disabled people involve us in the decision making process. We will be running projects, performances and exhibitions, arts groups, mentoring programmes and we will be supporting local communities to improve their approached to Disability Equality and the involvement of Disabled people in all that they do.
Partners
We work strategically with regional and national partners to ensure that Disability
Equality remains high on the cultural agenda and that it is considered in
all areas of art and culture planning. We aim to support organisations, bodies
and venues to improve their understanding and delivery of Disability Equality
and we work in a number of ways to achieve this.
Our work with partners on strategic artistic programme activities like Northern Stage and Waygood Gallery and Studios can bring about real change.
We also provide Disability Equality Training and Workshops as an introduction to increased understanding, and we provide bespoke consultancies which progress to more intensive scoping and development projects, perhaps towards Disability Equality Action Plans. Our vsp: programme can provide Ambassadors to work with an organisation or a venue over a number of months. You can find out more about Disability Equality processes we provide for organisations and venues on our Disability Equality page.
Our Context
It is estimated that at least 20% of the population of Britain is Disabled, rising to 25% of the population of the North East, with over 70% of us becoming Disabled as we age. The Disability Community is incredibly diverse but united in its shared experience of the societal, cultural and attitudinal barriers still facing Disabled people in 21st Century Britain.
As an introduction to Disability Equality in Art and Culture it is important to place it within a historical context to fully appreciate why there is a need to promote equal status at all. The history of Disabled people’s experience remains largely hidden. Really, since culture began to be recorded, Disabled people have been discriminated against, stereotyped and excluded from society.
The Ancient Greeks pursued human ‘perfection’; the Romans used Disabled children in cruel games; in folklore and fairy tales impairments were used to define negative characters eg witches, goblins, beasts and grotesques; in Medieval times Disabled people were cast outside village walls; during the witch hunts, the ‘malleus malleficarum’ described how to identify a witch by their impairments and it has been estimated that over a third of the millions of women killed would have been disabled women.
In the US President FD Roosevelt was a wheelchair user but hid this from the public through carefully edited photographs, saying that the American public would never elect a ‘cripple’; in Britain, Churchill described people with mental health problems as feeble minded and constituting a ‘race danger’; and, as Hitler’s experimentation began with Disabled people in the early 1930s, as many as 300,000 Disabled people are thought to have been murdered during the holocaust.
Disabled people in Britain did not have any legislative protection against discrimination until the last decade of the 20th Century, decades after the Disability Rights Movement began.
Disabled people’s academic analysis and research has revealed a history of cultural stereotyping, which is demonstrated well in film analysis in the British Film Institute’s On-line papers (go to www.bfi.org.uk and do a search for Disability for the full range of papers). Despite the legislation, in reality Disabled people's status as a community and for the majority of individuals remains much lower than that of other members of society. If this weren’t true there would be no need for legislation, for the continuance of the Disability Rights Movement, for Disability Equality Action Planning or for individuals and organisations to take Disability Discrimination cases.
We will know we have truly achieved Disability Equality when Disabled people are a natural part if the Cultural Landscape on the terms of Disabled people as a community, where our identities and culture are represented without hesitation, question or the need to ‘make our case’ for involvement.
Arcadea is working to ensure that the cultural status of Disabled people is changed to ensure that, as Disabled people, we can fully participate in all aspects of British life at all levels – as artists, poets, musicians, as leaders, managers and advisers, as audiences, students and participants.
Our Strategic Aims
- To work at a strategic regional level, and with national partners to promote and increase the cultural status of Disabled people
- To increase understanding of Disability Equality in Art and Culture as the value of Disability cultural identity, experience and representation beyond access and legislation
- To promote equality and a sustainable infrastructure for both emerging and professional Disabled Artists in the North East region
- To promote Disabled People as arts consumers, advisors, managers and practitioners
- To provide training and professional development, and information, for emerging and professional Disabled Artists
- To work with Disability partners to support and develop the Disability Community through artistic and cultural activity
- To work with strategic partners towards a culturally accessible arts environment and the development of models of excellence
Disability Equality
Arcadea’s primary role is to promote Disability Equality in Art and Culture and to ensure that Disabled people are represented on their own terms as a community within Art and Culture. Disability Equality is often mistaken to be solely about access. In fact, it is much more about the status Disabled people have in British society, which is reflected in how we are characterised culturally, and understanding and challenging how that status has been created, presented and perpetuated. Disability Equality is about taking responsibility for the inequalities of the past and addressing them in a cohesive strategic way which is driven by Disabled people.
Disability Discrimination Legislation is in place to ensure that Disabled people in Britain have the right to receive fair and equal access to employment, services, information, facilities, and education as everyone else. As the representative body of Disabled people in Art and Culture in the North East, Arcadea works to place these rights in a cultural context and to support both the Disability community and arts organisations and venues to achieve it. As a society we have to examine the what ways in which our cultural practices are discriminatory, which involves talking to Disabled people about their experiences.
Click here to go to our page on Disability Equality, about different models of Disability and the Disability Equality services arcadea provides.
Disability Art and Art by Disabled People
Disability Arts is an internationally recognised Arts Movement, described at a debate at Tate Modern (Organised by London Disability Arts Forum. 3 December 2008) by Yinka Shonibare (Turner Prize Nominee 2004) and Melvyn Bragg, as potentially the last remaining avant garde arts movement. It is a fairly young arts movement which first emerged during the 1980s and grew out of the Disabled People’s Movement. Disabled people who were influenced by the new ideas and lifestyles promoted by the Disabled people's movement began to use their artistic skills to express their feelings, life experiences, beliefs and attitudes, and to produce issue-based work.
In more recent times the work has continued to evolve its politics and its aesthetics, and incorporates the representation of the cultural identities of disabled people. It is also where the ideas around Disability Equality in Art and Culture began to be campaigned for. Leading figures from Disability Arts campaigned within the Arts Sector for equal opportunities and the equal representation of Disabled people at all levels within the arts.
Disability Arts has many new thinkers and is entering a new phase of its development. It is certainly where much expertise around Disability Equality in Art and Culture lies and as a movement, it is working hard to ensure that there is a cohesive approach to the understanding of Disability Equality in a 21st Century context. Internationally respected new voices are emerging and existing voices are consolidating their collective experience and expertise as we move the representation of Disabled people in cultural contexts forward into its new phase.
Art produced by Disabled people which is not necessarily an exploration or expression of their experience as a Disabled person is supported equally by arcadea. We are committed to removing the barriers still present in Art and Culture experienced by the majority of Disabled people. The Disability Community is incredibly diverse in its make up and arcadea acknowledges and embraces that, knowing that whilst it does not define us as people, one area of our common ground is our experience of exclusion.
The Disabled people’s movement and new legislation has meant that Disability Equality is now a right protected in law but as our context has outlined above, a significant cultural shift in thinking and practice is required if we are to achieve meaningful equality. Arcadea is actively supporting all Disabled artists, whatever the content of their work, towards this. We are also supporting organisations who work with Disabled people on arts projects to engage in a review of their practice and to actively promote a Disability Equality model.