The Art and Politics of Artists With Mental Disabilities Experiencing Confinement

Abstract

In this article, I utilize an indisciplinary theoretical framework through the work of Jacques Rancière to examine the artwork of artists with mental disabilities experiencing confinement in asylums in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. I further examine preexisting ways in which this artwork, focusing particularly on the Prinzhorn Collection, has been positioned within art history and psychiatric medical models in the 19th and early 20th centuries that situate these artists as geniuses, as examples of Expressionism, or as pathological. In contrast, I suggest that these artists’ work can be a form of politics and dissensus. The indisciplinarity of Rancière’s work and Disability Studies offer art educators new possibilities for understanding the artwork of people experiencing mental disabilities by disrupting the disciplinary logic that can inform thinking about these artists.

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