Artistic impact : from casual and serious leisure to professional career development in disability arts

All forms of arts participation are likely to lead to positive outcomes, but the nature and reach of these outcomes will differ. While arts programs have increasingly found favor in disability communities, these programs historically have been oriented toward therapeutic outcomes. They have not been taken seriously in terms of artistic outputs, the deeper benefits for participants, or potential wider societal impact. At the same time, there is anecdotal evidence of increasingly sophisticated artistic engagement involving artists with disability that are gaining wider public attention, popularity, and enabling a serious leisure experience for the artist with the opportunity for professional artistic career development. This article demonstrates how disability arts projects enable opportunities for casual leisure, serious leisure, and professional artistic engagement and examines the resultant social impact for each. To do this we investigate the characteristics and outcomes of three projects through an abductive research design involving a comparative qualitative case-based approach.