National Disability Art Collection and Archive (NDACA)

Alex Cowan, Archivist and Collections Lead

2024

The National Disability Art Collection and Archive (NDACA) is an archival collection looking at how art made by disabled people reflected, recorded and was inspired by the struggle for disability rights in the UK. From the outset, we were lucky that inclusivity was a major driver of this twentieth- and twenty-first-century rights struggle and serves to partially to insulate the collection from charges of overt racial (or other forms of) prejudice or exclusion.

The majority of work held in NDACA dates from the 1990s when Disabled people agitated for fundamental civil rights and social change through the adoption of the social model of disability. This era of activism and the people who agitated for it were primarily concerned with physical impairment.

The greatest challenge facing the collection has been to come to terms with and address the specificities of particular time periods, including the focuses of the rights movement and which disabled artists were working in parallel at the time. NDACA requires a collection expansion that fully acknowledges the cultural contribution of neuro-divergent artists and artists with learning difficulties. Both groups are under-represented in our collections.

This project made me aware that our catalogue, while trying to avoid the outdated medical model (where disability is defined and caused by an individual condition) uses descriptive language that makes it hard to identify neuro-divergent artists. It also lacks ‘easy read’ descriptions that can make collections more accessible for people with learning difficulties. The catalogue will be revised accordingly, including asking more artists to describe their own work.

The catalogue’s choice of suitable descriptive language will also need to change over time to reflect development in the social and cultural status of disabled people. Sourcing this terminology will require an engagement with disabled audiences to ensure that the demand ‘nothing about us without us’ is always met.

Visiting the collection is made accessible by using a website as an initial point of contact. However, being part of this project has made me reassess our visitor facilities. Barriers to access can deter potential visitors as effectively as lack of recognition within a collection.

Engagement between NDACA and a new user, whether an artistic practitioner or ‘ordinary’ visitor, often results in the discovery of new areas of interest or ways of working. When that engagement has at its heart an artistic survey and reflection of the whole collection, the resulting provocations carry extra weight that can complement existing change and suggest new pathways.

The 1990s focus of the NDACA ‘starter’ collection resulted in a situation where some groups are under-represented as artists or subjects. The collection does not reflect the diversity of disabled people. Working with the NDACA acquisitions group (which better reflects this diversity), we have rewritten the collections and acquisitions strategy to address this under-representation and to locate more diverse work. Jamila Prowse’s created work is part of that process.

We are widening our collecting focus. Recent work by the acquisitions group has sought to identify communities of disabled people that are poorly represented in the collection, either by their genuine absence, or a presence in archival assets still to be catalogued and digitised.

Participation in the 20/20 project has served to highlight the importance of recognising the combinations (and, in some cases, contradictions) around issues of intersectionality when attempting to make collections that truly reflect the diversity of the society, culture and experiences. NDACA welcomes the opportunity to widen its viewpoint, concerns and audiences.

From now on, we will make further efforts to hear their voices; source their work and interpretations; and exhibit to them.