In The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique, Amanda Cachia argues for disability art as a central force reshaping contemporary art, aesthetics, and museum practice. She shows that contemporary disabled artists are moving away from figurative representations of disability, instead creating an art of access, or access aesthetics, through artworks that center translation, sensory expansion, touch, and movement for audiences that offer an experience of “being with” disability. Access is framed not as accommodation added onto art institutions, but as something generated through artistic form itself: sensory, spatial, and conceptual. By making inequities in the museum more transparent, disabled artists are also engaging in institutional critique, demanding agency, voice, empowerment, and social justice. On a broader level, this book also shows how disability art extends and repurposes art historical precedents in directions that compel us to regard the artistic past differently.

Significantly, the book places disability art within broader modern and contemporary art history by linking it to earlier avant-garde strategies, reframing institutional disruption as part of a longer lineage of experimental spatial and perceptual practices. Showcasing artwork by contemporary disabled artists Park McArthur, Christine Sun Kim, Carmen Papalia, Carolyn Lazard, and Finnegan Shannon, among others, The Agency of Access inscribes contemporary disability art in the canon of modern and contemporary art.

Amanda Cachia is an internationally recognized scholar, curator, and writer whose work advances disability art history, theory, and activism; crip curatorial practices and access aesthetics; and museum studies and institutional critique. She is also author of Rehabilitating the Asylum: Mental Health Justice and Contemporary Art (2027), and Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism (2025), and the editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (2022). Her fourth book, Disability Art: A Political History, scheduled for 2028, is under contract with Yale University Press. A prolific scholar, her writing appears in TDR: The Drama Review, Journal of Visual Culture, Journal of Curatorial Studies, Art Journal, and American Art. She is Founding Editor of the Critical Studies in Art, Disability & Access book series at Manchester University Press. Her work has been supported by the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, College Art Association Millard Meiss Publication Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, Ford Foundation, and Canada Council for the Arts. Cachia is Professor of Practice in Museum Studies in the School of Art at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, where she also serves as Affiliate Faculty in the Disability Studies B.A. She is also Program Head of the ASU–LACMA Fellowship M.A. in Art History, supported by the Mellon Foundation.