In 2016, Tangled Art + Disability opened Canada’s first gallery dedicated to exhibiting Mad, Deaf, and disabled artists within Toronto’s legendary arts hub, 401 Richmond. Ten years later, Crip Canada: A Decade of Political Engagement reflects on a decade of transformation, marking Tangled Art Gallery’s establishment as what founding Artistic Director Eliza Chandler calls “a site of political engagement,” where disability culture and access aesthetics are inseparable from artistic innovation.
The artists gathered —Persimmon Blackbridge, Peter Owusu-Ansah, Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Michel Dumont, David Bobier (VibraFusionLab), Olivia Brouwer, and Alexander Stuber, from BEING Studio—each work from within disability culture, drawing on embodied knowledge, community, and collective making. Their practices span tactile mosaics, vibration-based sculpture, sound installation, and explorations of language and identity—together asserting disability as a generative force rather than a condition to be cured.
Crip Canada challenges the systemic ableism that has long framed disability through charitable or therapeutic lenses, and that continues to shape the mainstream art world. In its place, the exhibition positions disability arts within what British artist Yinka Shonibare (CBE) calls “the last avant-garde”—a movement redefining art’s political and aesthetic possibilities through interdependence, access, and care. Through Deaf-led approaches, tactile encounters, relaxed environments, and vibration-based works, Crip Canada shows how access beyond compliance transforms both who enters the gallery and how art itself is conceived and experienced.
Anchored in what Tangled’s Director of Programming, Sean Lee, calls the crip horizon—a politics of futurity that imagines worlds not yet here—the exhibition embraces the generative disruptions disability brings. By expanding access as a creative practice, Crip Canada not only advances conversations about inclusion but reshapes culture itself in felt and not-yet-knowable ways.
Image Credits:
Peter Owusu-Ansah, Sunny Vibe, 2025. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Alt-text: Concentric squares of colour radiate outward from the centre in smooth, rhythmic layers. The palette moves through a spectrum of yellows—soft lemon, amber, gold, ochre, and orange—each hue shifting subtly into the next.
