October is both National Arts and Humanities Month and National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM). Every year at this time I reflect on the work of people with disabilities in the arts – as artists, arts educators, and as arts administrators. While I spend this month celebrating and promoting the work of talented artists and cultural workers in all art forms and types of organizations, I have been making some observations about disability and the arts, both in the past and in our post-COVID world. 

On September 26 we celebrated the 50th anniversary of a landmark piece of disability legislation, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. This law requires all federal agencies and recipients of federal funding to ensure that people with disabilities can fully participate in their programs and access their facilities. It laid the foundation for the NEA’s requirements for accessibility and our agency’s long history of pushing the arts field to be accessible, inclusive, and equitable for people with disabilities. The NEA was the first small agency and the third of all federal agencies to implement our regulations under this law in 1979 after we were pushed by a member of the National Council on the Arts whose wife couldn’t access arts activities due to being a wheelchair user. We began supporting capacity-building efforts for arts organizations to bring their facilities and programs into compliance and implemented an accessibility education and awareness campaign through the state arts agencies and arts organizations across the country.

The NEA’s support for this work over the past 50 years goes beyond accessibility for audiences to include access to professional opportunities for artists and arts workers. I recently looked through some old NEA annual reports and discovered that in 1982 the NEA provided funding to the President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped [sic] to develop a handbook on careers in the arts for people with disabilities. This felt like a full-circle moment because 40 years after this publication, this past July, we launched a toolkit on careers in the arts for people with disabilities, with resources drawn from the President’s Committee’s successor, the US Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP), which is also the office that develops and markets National Disability Employment Awareness Month resources and information. (In yet another full-circle moment, in 2009, I represented ODEP, where I at that time worked as a disability policy advisor, at the NEA’s Summit on Careers in the Arts for People with Disabilities, bringing ODEP resources on recruiting and hiring workers with disabilities to the arts sector to help ensure full inclusion of people with disabilities in arts professions.)

As I reflect on this work in 2023, I see the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on artists and arts organizations and on the disability community. As lockdowns shut down in-person arts activities we saw the arts community shift – quickly and brilliantly – to find ways to engage, educate, and share their work with audiences through virtual platforms, outdoor activities, and other socially-distanced arts experiences. Disabled artists also found innovative ways to continue creating and sharing their art. Performers with the disability arts ensemble Kinetic Light went into a COVID “bubble” to create their dance piece Wired and a short documentary made available online with different combinations of access, including American Sign Language, captions, and audio description. At the same time, disability arts organization DisArt worked with artist Oaklee Thiele to develop a global art collaboration called “My Dearest Friends,” which centered the lived experience of disability during the pandemic by collecting stories from the disability community confronted with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This pivot came naturally for disabled artists, as people with disabilities have always been experts in finding creative ways to live in and move through the world.

During the lockdown people with and without disabilities appreciated opportunities to engage in the arts through hybrid and virtual offerings. Many people with disabilities had access to arts events that they would otherwise miss due to inaccessible spaces or to health conditions that make being in public difficult or dangerous. The availability of auto-caption features made communication more seamless and the ease of using virtual platforms opened up new connections to the arts.

However, as arts organizations have opened back up and “returned to normal,” the disability community has expressed concern about being forgotten. Many people with disabilities still do not feel comfortable in art spaces as some are vulnerable to the COVID virus and others found the virtual environment much easier to access. While arts organizations are eager to get people into their performing arts spaces, museums, and classrooms, they must continue to consider the needs of the disability community, whether by offering virtual and hybrid options or by ensuring the health and safety of people once they are in public spaces with the health and safety protocols learned during the pandemic. This type of access can be as important as, for example, a ramp or sign language interpretation, and should be considered when planning arts activities or building accessibility practices.

As we move beyond the “COVID era” I am encouraged by what seems to be increased interest in accessibility from the arts community. One marker of this interest is the Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability (LEAD) Conference, run by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Office of Accessibility and VSA, which grew from a pre-COVID level of around 600 attendees in 2019 to almost 1,000 in 2023. Arts organizations, while facing challenges due to COVID, seem to be devoting more resources toward accessibility. I see two possible reasons for this growth in interest: One is the recent increase in attention toward equity and diversity, which includes disability, throughout the arts sector. The second is that during the pandemic people learned how important access is at a time when the world lost access to so much, and arts organizations now understand the need to be more open and welcoming to all audiences and participants.

The arts community for the past 50 years has relied on the disability community to “pull” the arts sector toward access and equity for audiences and artists with disabilities, so I am glad to see an increase in the push toward accessibility from arts organizations. I’m heartened by this shift but recognize that there is still a lot to be done.  We can use what we learned during the pandemic, the flexibility and innovation shown by arts organizations and disabled artists and the need for access, to continue to push for full access and equity in our work for the next 50 years.

Beth Bienvenu is the director of the Office of Accessibility at the National Endowment for the Arts, where she manages the NEA's technical assistance and advocacy work devoted to making the arts accessible for people with disabilities, older adults, veterans, and people in institutional settings.