NONPROFITS

As we mark the 34th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), signed into law on July 26, 1990, we recognize and celebrate the disability rights movement. To honor this milestone date, the New Hampshire Center for Justice and Equity spoke with Jeff Symes, who leads the Unified + Inclusive Arts group, based in Nashua, about the initiative’s effort to promote inclusion in the arts industry.

From dance to text, graphics to music, U+I Arts encourages the participation of individuals with disabilities in the creative process across a wide range of arts media. “The urge to create and to express is one of humankind’s oldest compulsions. U+I Arts aims to make connections and provide fuel for collaborations between the arts community of greater Nashua and artists who have disabilities,” said Jeff Symes, co-founder of U+I Arts.

Disability inclusion has gained visibility in the missions and practices of arts organizations around the world.

“U+I Arts is aligned with this equity mindset, driven by a desire to create collaborative opportunities for individuals with disabilities to participate in community projects in the greater Nashua area,” Symes said.

Their contributions encompass different artistic expressions, with members who draw, play music, sing and dance, write, photograph, edit videos and even design their own fashions.

Part of U+I Arts’ mission is also to facilitate the movement of people with disabilities into leadership positions, where they can make decisions on projects, such as choosing the community locations or the groups to approach for collaborations.

“People with disabilities demonstrate that we perceive and experience the world in diverse ways. Some people, occasionally through necessity, engineer their own means to meet and understand the world,” Symes said.

“We accept and include some of those people, those we call ‘artists.’ For an artist who can perceive with imagination, inclusion is an instinctive and creative act,” he said. “It is in the arts community, in the very human urge to create, to seek and discover, invent, translate, blend, contrast, unify and connect, that we may find common ground and the best environments for inclusion.”

Individual perception is what has most affected our public conduct toward disability. From childlike innocence to pathological menace, history has treated people with disabilities according to the views of each era. Before the advent of institutions in the mid-19th century, which focused on restraint and control, disability was largely an accepted or at least expected part of family and community life, especially in non-Western cultures.

Symes referenced “New Hampshire’s own School for the Feeble-Minded, which opened in 1903 and later changed its name to Laconia State School in 1924, is an example of shifting perceptions of disability.” He added that “the switch from the term ‘feeble-minded’ to today’s ‘developmentally disabled’ demonstrates that the words we use to refer to disability have also evolved through the years.”

Once a source of local pride, by the time New Hampshire’s only state-run institution was closed in 1991, Laconia State School had come to be seen with other institutions as sites of neglect and brutality, becoming targets of lawsuits that spurred the nationwide deinstitutionalization movement begun in the 1960s.

“It has been an uphill battle ever since to provide people with disabilities the opportunity to rejoin their communities, to become not only a visible but a vital part of daily life,” Symes said.

People with disabilities are often overlooked, or marginalized, because of their differences from what is “typical.” Nonetheless, exclusion is frequently less of an intentional act than it is a response to discomfort, lack of information and experience, and a fear of saying and doing something wrong.

“Silence is the most common culprit in exclusion. Exclusion can run in both directions when people with disabilities exclude themselves from a community or activity by the very same products of inexperience, fear and discomfort,” Symes said.

By encouraging creative collaborations, promoting the inclusion of artists with disabilities in the creative industry, and providing them with leadership opportunities, U+I Arts is paving the way for a more inclusive and equitable future.

To learn more about their inspiring initiatives or to get involved, reach out to U+I Arts at ui.artsgroup@gmail.com.

Jeff Symes has worked in the disability support system in NH for more than 15 years, from direct support to service coordination/case management. Working with participants in that support system, colleagues and community members, he helped found U+I Arts as a community group to work and create in collaboration outside the system.