Crip Canada: A Decade of Political Engagement - Tangled Art + Disability (Toronto)

20 Feb-23 May 2026

Sunny Vibes

Overview

In 2016, Tangled Art + Disability (Toronto) opened Canada’s first gallery dedicated to exhibiting Mad, Deaf, and disabled artists. Crip Canada reflects on a decade of transformation, marking the emergence of the organisation as a site of political engagement where disability culture and access aesthetics are inseparable from artistic innovation.

The artists featured—Persimmon Blackbridge, Peter Owusu-Ansah, Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Michel Dumont, VibraFusionLab, Olivia Brouwer, and BEING Studio—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 continues to shape the art world—the architectures, funding models, and curatorial habits that have long framed disability through charitable or therapeutic lenses. In their place, the exhibition positions disability arts within what Yinka Shonibare calls “the last avant-garde”—a movement that redefines art’s political and aesthetic possibilities through interdependence, access, and care.