{"id":275503,"date":"2026-05-01T19:50:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-02T00:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/acces-accorde-quelques-reflexions-pour-lavenir\/"},"modified":"2026-04-27T15:28:55","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T20:28:55","slug":"acces-accorde-quelques-reflexions-pour-lavenir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/acces-accorde-quelques-reflexions-pour-lavenir\/","title":{"rendered":"Access Granted: Some Thoughts for the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Praise Frisco<\/em> is nostalgic yet futuristic, with a redesign of city infrastructure set amongst smiling portraits of some of the people who shape Scott\u2019s world.These include Diana Ross, church women praise dancing, and youthful depictions of himself and his mother. In a short video accompanying the work, Scott says he wants people to feel \u201cso happy,\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - See William Scott, \u201cWilliam Scott: Praise Frisco<\/em>,\u201d SFMOMA video, 3:10, accessible online.<\/span> a point echoed in white painted letters at the top of the mural: \u201cPraise Frisco at night \/ Future of San Francisco \/ Love in the city \/ Peace of a gospel city \/ Joy and happiness.\u201d In Praise Frisco<\/em>, Scott insists on a future marked with joy in a world filled with too much violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Greeting visitors to the second-floor gallery space, Praise Frisco<\/em> was presented in October 2024 in SFMOMA\u2019s exhibition Creative Growth: The House That Art Built. <\/em>The show marked the fiftieth anniversary of Creative Growth Art Center, the prolific developmental disabilityarts organization of which Scott has been a studio member for more than thirty years. The first of its kind, Creative Growth began in the garage of founders Florence Ludins-Katz and Elias Katz amid a landscape of 1970s deinstitutionalization, where the closure of large carceral-style institutions was met with meagre community infrastructure. Their founding mission has not wavered: to advance the practices of artists with developmental disabilities in contemporary art milieux, while advocating for the power of artistic expression as a path to social inclusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
William Scott<\/strong>
Praise Frisco: Peace and Love in the City<\/em>, installation view,
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2024.
Photo: Don Ross, courtesy of
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The term \u201cdevelopmental disability\u201d may refer both to personal identity and function as a legal signifier that falls under the umbrella designation of intellectual and developmental disability (IDD). Here, I alternate between the signifiers \u201cdevelopmental disability\u201d and \u201cIDD,\u201d the former being the term most often used by Creative Growth and the latter employed in advocacy. The reality is, access to the Creative Growth studio is not as simple as arriving there; it is knotted in a web of governmental services that necessitate assessment and legal recognition of disability involving a set of criteria encompassed in the term \u201cIDD.\u201d Whether Scott personally identifies with the diagnostic terminology that enables his membership in the organization is unclear, as the experience of disability often exceeds such categorization. This tension is symptomatic of the intricacy of naming, something that crip theory addresses by asserting the overlapping complexities of identity related to race, disability, class, gender, and sexuality in relation to systems of oppression and privilege.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - See Sami Schalk, \u201cComing to Claim Crip: Disidentification with\/in Disability Studies,\u201d Disability Studies Quarterly<\/em> 33, no. 2 (2013), February 16, 2026, accessible online.<\/span> Thinking through such tensions as generative, here I situate Scott\u2019s Praise Frisco<\/em> within a broader discussion of Creative Growth to consider the contemporary relationship between IDD and crip politics. In doing so, I consider how artists within the category of IDD are essential to the evolving domain of crip culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Praise Frisco<\/em> could be interpreted through the logics of crip futurity<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200aa framework, introduced by the disability scholar Alison Kafer, that embraces the imaginative, world-building potentiality of disability experience.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip<\/em> (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 26.<\/span> Creating a social topography that is both pragmatic and whimsical,on the right side of the mural Scott appeals directly to former San Francisco mayor London Breed with a proposed reconstruction of the Alice Griffith public housing development; on the left, a map-like diagram of the city features a colourful Mickey Mouse arch and a green UFO, the \u201cSky Friendly Organization Citizen Ship.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - See Max Blue, \u201cWilliam Scott,\u201d BOMB Magazine<\/em>, August 21, 2024, accessible online.<\/span> Scott\u2019s enduring theme of optimism, highlighted through his use of bright colours, positive language, and large joyful faces, could be indicative of crip joy<\/em>, an assertion of futures marked by happiness, rejecting narratives of disability marked solely by lack or suffering.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - See \u201cOur Values,\u201d The Disability Collective, February 16, 2026, accessible online.<\/span> But, Scott doesn\u2019t identify crip futurity or crip joy as terms in his work. Neither do his critics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"The
William Scott<\/strong>
Praise Frisco: Peace and Love in the City<\/em> (detail), 2024.
Photo: Don Ross, courtesy of
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCrip\u201d is not a word associated with or thematically present in the press kits and promotional materials associated with the artist or the Creative Growth exhibition. Although foundational authors such as Kafer foreground the experiences of people with IDD, colloquial use of the term \u201ccrip\u201d is much less apparent in IDD communities.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip<\/em>, 47\u201368.<\/span> Though increasingly rare among self-advocates, in IDD spaces one is still more likely to hear terms such as \u201cspecial needs\u201d as opposed to \u201ccrip.\u201d The former is generally considered cringe at best, offensive and ableist at worst, in the broader schemas of contemporary crip and disability politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Such frictions reveal both the complexities of language and the opacity of the rhetoric often employed when theorizing about the cultural identity of crip. This is not to say that the goals and actions of IDD and crip communities are misaligned; rather, it is a testament to the heterogeneity of languages and the specificities of identity across different cultural spaces and institutions.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, discursive vernacular naturally presents barriers to many people with IDD, contributing to their marginal position within the broader scope of disability politics. Although self-advocacy is a key tenet of IDD movements, the self-representation and productive discourse so intertwined with crip arts is not a reality or of interest for many. This attests to the multiplicities of disability and the generative complexities that emerge in contemporary crip politics. Given my engagement with theory and the specialized terminology it deploys, even the language that I use is outside the realm of accessibility for many people\u200a\u2014\u200aa difficulty that I wrestle with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The absence of theoretical jargon does not make IDD any less important to the crip corpus. As disability scholars remind us, crip is as much an identity as an analytic.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - See Robert McRuer, \u201cThe Then and There of Crip Futurity,\u201d GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies <\/em>20, no. 4 (2014): 532\u201334.<\/span> This reveals an exciting challenge in thinking about crip futurity. How do we ensure that crip politics includes advocacy for those who do not identify with crip identity politics? Does the inclusion of IDD within disability art spaces crip the very idea of cripping<\/em> the arts?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can draw answers to these questions from Scott\u2019s vision of futurity. Scott combines the revitalization of infrastructure with people who occupy the central viewpoints of the mural. This signals that community is at the core of a city\u2019s futurity. Emphasizing the need for social change, Scott\u2019s architectural renderings are not isolated from the people who live in them, suggesting that the built environment is shaped by the relationships of those who inhabit it. Addressing broader questions of citizenship and community, Praise Frisco<\/em> exemplifies many of the themes typically present in Scott\u2019s work: proposals for revitalized collective spaces, Black portraiture, and sincere hope. His work thus alludes to crip futurity not as a static ideal but as an ongoing reworking of time, place, and possibility\u200a\u2014\u200ahighlighting community as both its method and its commitment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The central role of community in Scott\u2019s work underscores why organizations like Creative Growth are important. Today, Creative Growth provides supportive studio environments for over 140 artists and has inspired similar initiatives globally, including Les Impatients and Art Seen programs in Montr\u00e9al. In tandem with providing studio space, Creative Growth represents Scott and many other members, promoting their work at New York events such as the Outsider Art Fair and New Art Dealers Alliance, facilitating collaborations with other institutions, and managing the sale of their artworks. In doing so, Creative Growth emphasizes the value that people with developmental disabilities bring to art as artists<\/em>, a role stereotypically regarded as outside the realm of possibility.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"A
Creative Growth: The House That Art Built<\/em>
Exhibition view, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2024.
Photo: Don Ross, courtesy of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

In Disability Aesthetics<\/em> (2020), disability studies scholar Tobin Siebers explains that the creation of the art object is typically predicated on ideas of aesthetics and taste related to a pre-defined range of mental actions and human intelligence. He argues that people with mental impairment are often assumed to lack the cognitive ability necessary to develop work of aesthetic value.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics<\/em> (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2010), 15.<\/span> This reflects the obvious lack of access to artmaking practices as well as the pervasive devaluing of IDD in society. Crucially, it reveals an innate intellectual ableism central to the idea of artistic merit.With a long history of exhibitions, Scott obviously contradicts such ableist preconceptions. However, Praise Frisco <\/em>is not concerned with presenting an isolated \u201cdisability experience\u201d to prove the worth of disabled artists to the presumably non-disabled audience. Instead, he paints a collective future in which individual experience is mediated by both community and infrastructure. In doing so, he rejects the tokenizing tendencies of major institutions that often confine disability art to individualized identity-based frameworks. This crips<\/em> dated opinions about disability while affirming the breadth of disability art outside of individualized narratives of identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Creative Growth challenges the infrastructural and institutional limitations preventing people with IDD from becoming artists, and Scott\u2019s success as an artist functions as lived evidence of such a possibility. However, art is not just the material substrate supporting relationships between artists and spectators. Art and its sites of diffusion are composed of cultural actors within communities that have greater sociopolitical impact. Although the presence of Praise Frisco<\/em> within institutional settings like the SFMOMA is important, and an axis of their operations, reducing Creative Growth\u2019s scope to representational output is dangerous. It reinforces a neoliberal model of inclusion that is predicated on the capacity to \u201cmake art\u201d deemed valuable by the very institutions that have historically devalued disability. This is an example of the institutional appropriation that crip politics is so against. As the philosopher Julia Kristeva notes, success of the singular disabled artist validates the person by enabling the objects they produce to be included in the \u201ccircle of consumption.\u201d9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Julia Kristeva, \u201cA Tragedy and a Dream: Disability Revisited,\u201d Irish Theological Quarterly<\/em> 78, no. 3 (2013): 219\u201330.<\/span> A singular material change does nothing to shift larger imbalances of power when they are validated by the logic of capitalist production, which absorbs the condition of disability into an art object without addressing ableist norms that marginalize IDD in the first place. Further, the anthropologist Don Kulick and the gender studies scholar Jens Rydstr\u00f6m critique the tendency in disability activism to focus on people who produce \u201ccultural artifacts,\u201d which excludes the subjectivities of those who don\u2019t have the desire or capacity to make things.10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Don Kulick and Jens Rydstr\u00f6m, Loneliness and Its Opposite: Sex, Disability, and the Ethics of Engagement<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 15\u201316.<\/span> In doing so, we uphold a cultural imaginary of personhood that locates the conditions of inclusion in an individual\u2019s ability to secure a place within the productive logic of art-world politics. Unless accompanied by broader infrastructural change, such artistic exposure risks falling into a diversity politics that affirms the cultural marginalization of people with IDD by sending more artwork into Kristeva\u2019s circle of consumption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What comes after landmark commissions like Praise Frisco<\/em>? Given that art fosters understanding, viewers may reckon with their own intellectual ableism. But does this do enough to challenge or incite long-term change? Insofar as art bridges cultural boundaries, cultivating disability art spaces that value the perspectives and contributions of people with IDDs is integral to truly develop crip futures. We need to embrace Scott\u2019s optimistic futurity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"William Scott paints love letters to San\u00a0Francisco. His largest work to date, Praise\u00a0Frisco: Peace and Love in the City<\/em>\u00a0(2024), is a landmark commission from\u00a0the San Francisco Museum of Modern\u00a0Art (SFMOMA). Composed of colourfully montaged illustrations, the wall-length mural enmeshes Scott\u2019s personal\u00a0history with cultural iconography.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":275499,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[8014],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[8026],"artistes":[8096],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[319],"class_list":["post-275503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-117-crip","auteurs-jessie-myfanwy-stainton-en","artistes-william-scott-en","type_post-principal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275503"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275509,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275503\/revisions\/275509"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275503"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=275503"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=275503"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=275503"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=275503"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=275503"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=275503"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=275503"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=275503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}