The Innovation Hub team visited the Tangled Art Gallery this November for the International Persons with Disabilities Day. In this blog, Catherine reflects on this visit and the importance of “crip art”—art created by disabled artists.
Written by Catherine Dumé, Community Coordinator, Master of Arts, Political Science
For International Persons with Disabilities Day, we visited the Tangled Art Gallery to appreciate and reflect on art created by disabled artists. Visiting the gallery gave me space to reflect on the connotations behind the word “disability”, and why it is that the negative connotations always come to mind first. “Crip art” gives us the opportunity to recognize these lived experiences with disabilities through creative mediums.
Expressing “Disability Joy”
Certain aspects of my disabled life have been complicated, painful, or frustrating to the point that I have hated it. So, out of frustration, I have written poetry such as “Broken Record.”
“Broken Record” stems from feeling like a literal broken record—having to repeat things, asking others “What did you say? Huh? What?”, over and over again. It’s meant to show how others stop listening to me in their frustration to understand what I am saying because, “I am broken, never once perfect, but broken.” How due to my high-frequency hearing loss, I do not hear the letter “S”, leading to unintentional spelling mistakes when “listen” becomes “liztend” and “spoken” becomes “’poken.”
Yet, despite my frustration with my hearing loss, to drink a magical elixir that would cure me of everything that is supposedly “wrong” with me, would erase a part of who I am and who I have worked hard to become.
“Why should I pay for an experience that isn’t mine? Why should I be fixed, when I am just fine?”
If it wasn’t for my hearing loss, I wouldn’t be as good of a listener as I am now. This might seem ironic, but listening is just as much about understanding audible sounds as it is connecting with people and their needs. I wouldn’t be as empathetic or compassionate, and I wouldn’t have become as devoted of an advocate as I am now. This is why I love community building, and I get to experience this everyday as the iHub’s Community Coordinator.
This is my life, purely unfiltered, expressing pain, joy, and everything in between. This is the beauty of “Crip Art”—an unfiltered look into the life of a disabled person.
The “Crip” in “Crip-Art”
The first time I heard of the term “Crip art” I was taking a critical disability course. At first, I was uncomfortable using the term “crip” simply because I was taught that it was a derogatory slur. However, as my professor explained, disability advocates began reclaiming the term to get rid of the negative connotation. One of those ways was celebrating the creative artworks that many disabled artists have produced over the years through the term “Crip Art.”
The “Cripping the Arts” movement does more than solely recognize that people with disabilities have the ability to contribute to our creative culture. It highlights the fact that these artists intentionally, through their creative expression, invite audiences into the beautiful (and sometimes painful) experience of living life as a person with a disability.
Thus, for International Day of Persons with Disabilities, it was my utmost pleasure as a person with a disability to invite the iHub team and members of the U of T Community to a tour of Tangled, a not-for-profit art gallery in Toronto which platforms disabled artists.
Visiting the Tangled Gallery
On November 28th, 2025, we visited Tangled for a tour of their exhibits. Each month, the gallery showcases work from different disabled artists. On display this month was Sarah Sproule’s “Curing the Ghost” and Kat Singer’s “Alexithymia”. Both artists expressed their own personal experiences as individuals living with disabilities. Sproule’s broken clay angel wings and misshaped green dressers represented the complexity of identity and disability in navigating one’s relationship with their own body. By inviting visitors to embody their own version of alexithymia using tactile, crocheted pieces of work, Singer’s black and white knitting masterpieces showed how she struggles to express and describe emotion.
Visiting the gallery was an eye-opening experience. For some of us, it was our first time viewing “crip art” in an exhibit. We found it inspiring how vulnerable the artists and their art were. In many of these spaces, like the AGO, the ROM, or even the Bata Shoe Museum, we are prevented from taking pictures or interacting with the artwork, left to use only our eyes to avoid physically damaging the pieces. But at Tangled, we were encouraged to gently touch the artwork; explore the smoothness of the ribbon and the rough, bumpy texture of layered paint and clay. We were even able to watch an ALS interpretation of the artwork as the Tangled staff shared the story of the artwork and their meaning.
Explore More Disability Art
If you would like to explore disability art in Toronto, I encourage you to visit the Tangled Gallery for a tour or drop-in. Their space is accessible for everyone, whether you’re blind, hard of hearing, have a physical disability or are immunocompromised. It’s truly one of the most unique and inclusive spaces in Toronto.
You can also visit The Disability Collective’s Disability Holiday Festival, which is happening on Sunday December 7, 2025, from 11am – 5pm at Wychwood Barns. Not only will you get to view more “crip art,” but there will also be amazing live music from musicians with disabilities.
No matter how you celebrate International Day of Persons with Disabilities, I implore you to listen to our stories and make space for our experiences.
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