The “Swell”: Disability Arts in the Time of COVID-19

This chapter surveys the disability arts in the United States during the pandemic. Disabled artists and activists responded to the COVID-19 crisis not only with heightened media advocacy and visibility, but also with reinvention of the public sphere to come. Artists have rethought remote access along with possibilities for work, care, and civic participation. The authors trace the technical rejigging, mutual aid, creative worldmaking, and intersectional activism that are the life lessons of living with non-normative bodyminds. Living otherwise has long characterized the daily creativity that disability demands, whether in the staging of daily life or on stage. The work of the disabled artist-activists discussed in this chapter indexes the high learning curve of the present and underscores that disability is not only an ingenious way to live—it is an ongoing set of critiques of the longstanding inequalities that underpin the present epidemic.