Albert Stabler

Illinois State University, Art Education, Faculty Member

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Art Education, Graduate Student

Appalachian State University, Art Education, Faculty Member

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Papers by Albert Stabler

Autistic Aesthetics Versus Art Pedagogy

Research in Arts and Education, 2026

In video works that externalize embodied experiences of interaction and reflection, the autistic ... more In video works that externalize embodied experiences of interaction and reflection, the autistic creators Sonia Boué and Mel Baggs separately balance words and imagery to articulate intimacy with the physical world, in the service of affirming a political consciousness of neurodivergent personhood. In this essay I elucidate the compelling communicative strategies of artworks and texts by Baggs and Boué, to highlight sympathetic pedagogical and psychiatric projects which have helped to create space for autistic artistic experiences, and to point to the gaps all of these figures illuminate in Western aesthetic philosophy and art education.

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Fabricating decolonial futures: The power of Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 2026

Inspired by important works of speculative fiction, the movements of Afrofuturism and Indigenous ... more Inspired by important works of speculative fiction, the movements of Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism have come to encompass a wide range of works by Black and Indigenous creators, including but not limited to visual artists. In this article I describe my own work as a White high school art teacher in a BIPOC classroom, leading class projects motivated by the fascinating overlaps of traditional practices, social critique, and futuristic fantasy in Afrofuturist art. I then go on to describe speculative creative works by Indigenous and Black artists that have continued to follow this path, particularly using digital tools and new media platforms. I end by talking about the expansive possibilities for using these visually and narratively compelling works as examples that promote imaginative making, reflection, and discussion around politics and history, as well as formal and technical engagement and experimentation. Throughout the piece I consider the complexities of this work being taken up by both White and BIPOC teachers, and by White and BIPOC students.

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Hospital, asylum, prison, gallery: Debility and aesthetic infrastructure

RACAR, 2024

Many disabled artists have used imagery or literal examples of medical or medical-adjacent techno... more Many disabled artists have used imagery or literal examples of medical or medical-adjacent technology in their works, invoking and evoking a range of significations, connotations, and effects. In turn, the antiseptic anti-aesthetic of the hospital, as well as other hygienic spaces of short- or long-term incarceration, has resonated in various ways with the equally blank and institutional but highly aestheticized space of the modern and/or contemporary gallery or museum. In implicitly or explicitly linking the hospital and the gallery, work by disabled artists participates in the tradition of institutional critique in a manner that has meaningful but underexplored connotations that touch on ideas of embodiment, display, imperfection, and control. Disabled artists, in a range of ways, undertake a penetrating critique of operations by which disability is both hidden and ubiquitous in the visual landscape, physical infastructure, and ideological sensibilities of industrialized modernity.

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Visionary Barricades: Art Class as Memorial Faculty

Journal of Cultural Theory in Art Education, 2024

With the ad hoc artifact of the barricade as a framing motif, I discuss practical, political, and... more With the ad hoc artifact of the barricade as a framing motif, I discuss practical, political, and artistic uses of found material by communities living in enclosure. Beginning with the street memorial, I move to briefly describing a number of projects undertaken in my urban high school art classroom and intended for public display, all of which responded to current events and many of which used found materials.

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Data disabilty detour

Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 2024

Interest has been percolating in the educational application of images to convey information in ... more Interest has been percolating in the educational application of images to convey information in data visualizations, also known as infographics. This may be partly a curricular manifestation of the positivist culture of data-driven education, in keeping with a long visual legacy of empirical research within education, dating back to the study of drawing among proponents of the Child Study movement at the turn of the 20th century. These recent efforts continue the legacy of STEAM projects that incorporate numeracy and systematic observation into creative work, but also reflect the past few decades of education policy and research more generally, during which quantified data have become the supreme criterion of legitimacy. However, art has long been considered a medium for learning and study within curriculum studies (Rolling, 2009; Springgay et al., 2005), while in recent art history there is a genealogy in which information developed into an autonomous medium in global postwar fine art that de-emphasized the authority of the image, replacing it with verbal speech and visual text. In looking at this artistic tradition, over a half-century old, there are many ways in which artists have used symbolic and analytic approaches to make artwork that defied and undermined institutions, rather than reflecting and reifying them, presaging an interest among arts education scholars and practitioners in emancipatory, sensory-based action research.

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LETTER TO THE QUEEN OF ART EDUCATION

Experiments in Art Education: How Do We Live Questions Through Art?, 2024

In this short epistolary experiment, I reflect elliptically on the role of the art teacher educat... more In this short epistolary experiment, I reflect elliptically on the role of the art teacher educator in relation to policing and disability, within and beyond the university. I draw on well-known texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Jacques Lacan, and Theodor Adorno to speculatively and/or poetically critique persistent parochial habits of institutionally mediated anxiety, hypocrisy, and disavowal within both the academic practice of art education pedagogy, and mainstream education discourse more broadly.

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Disabling Critique

Feminist Pedagogy, 2024

Considerable research has documented student resistance to efforts at diversity and equity in col... more Considerable research has documented student resistance to efforts at diversity and equity in college curricula. Scholars have also focused on negative attitudes among K-12 teacher candidates toward anti-racist and culturally informed approaches within education, as well as on the instrumental and teacher-centered approaches that typify special education teacher preparation. Through citing this research and drawing on my own experiences as a disabled art teacher education faculty instructor attempting to encourage a critical disability perspective, I make the argument that numerous factors contribute to an anti-critical attitude among teacher candidates preparing to work with students receiving special education services.

format_quoteThe intersection of race and disability in education challenges traditional teacher preparation methods, revealing structural barriers.format_quote

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Art Evading Confinement: Abolition as Universal Design

Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, 2023

Universal Design, initially an approach to designing barrier-free architectural spaces for disabl... more Universal Design, initially an approach to designing barrier-free architectural spaces for disabled people, has primarily been adapted to schooling through the Universal Design for Learning framework. Contemporary abolitionism is a visionary grassroots movement to make prisons and jails obsolete, which has been brought into education discourse primarily through considering urban public schools as institutions of policing and punishment. By considering these strategies for reforming and ending confinement, respectively, this essay argues for a more expansive understanding of access in education. The argument for their compatibility in arts education is articulated first through reviewing shared aspects of these two approaches, then surveying examples drawn from artists' practices, and lastly through a pedagogical approach framing the school as a complex and contradictory setting for making art.

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“There's really almost nobody there who's trying to make sense of it”

Visual Arts Research

The culture of criminal punishment is a point of departure that the multifaceted Chicago-based ar... more The culture of criminal punishment is a point of departure that the multifaceted Chicago-based artist Marc Fischer has returned to repeatedly over his career. Marc began corresponding with incarcerated people while distributing his photocopied fanzines in high school. While attending Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh as an undergraduate, he curated an exhibition with the work of several artists incarcerated at the now-shuttered Western State Penitentiary. Through corresponding with incarcerated people, Marc met and developed a long-term collaboration with Angelo, a prolific artist incarcerated in California. Angelo&#39;s drawings and descriptions of incarcerated people&#39;s improvised implements were assembled into a 2003 book titled Prisoners&#39; Inventions by the artist collective Temporary Services, through which Marc collaborates alongside Brett Bloom and Salem Collo-Julin. A contemporaneous traveling exhibition by the same name included examples of the inventions Angelo sketched and described in the book. Since that time, Marc has occasionally collaborated with projects addressing incarceration, as with Captive Audience, a group show he put together in 2007 at Chicago&#39;s Gallery 400, consisting of work addressing imprisonment and surveillance by incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and non-incarcerated artists. Another example is his collaboration with the collective Lucky Pierre; in 2012, Marc published their set of performance scores, 100 Actions for Chicago Torture Justice, which responded to the city&#39;s infamous legacy of violent interrogations by police officials like Jon Burge and Richard Zuley. On his own and Bert Stabler in conversation with Marc Fischer

Stoic Indulgence, Gratuitous Restraint: White Feelings and Campus Art

Studies in Art Education, 2023

The 2010s saw a revival of reactionary politics on college campuses, which now appear to have pav... more The 2010s saw a revival of reactionary politics on college campuses, which now appear to have paved the way for contemporary right-wing culture-war talking points regarding K-12 education. Revanchist attitudes around race, as well as gender and sexuality, can be linked to White Americans&#39; affective attachments to ideas of historical entitlement, which can be seen both in campus responses to university art programming and in acts of student vandalism. I describe a campus gallery exhibition I organized in 2016 around the theme of White affect, and I make connections between expressions of rage, anguish, and reasonableness on the part of White people within White-dominated institutions of art and education, before considering what possibilities and difficulties may exist for leading substantive classroom discussions and projects that engage explicitly with race generally, and Whiteness in particular.

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False Atonality, True Non-Totality

Punctum Books, Dec 14, 2016

The tension between primal chaos and martial order is key to the emotional appeal of metal, but a... more The tension between primal chaos and martial order is key to the emotional appeal of metal, but also to much of sound art. Reflecting on a conversation between Seth Kim-Cohen and Christoph Cox in the Artforum letters column regarding Doug Aitken&#39;s realization of Sonic Pavilion, a sound piece originally proposed by Bruce Nauman, I reflect on my own musical ideals and desires as regards fantasies of musical virtuosity, violence, and incompleteness.

A Sterile Hole and a Mask of Feces

Punctum Books, May 19, 2015

Through metaphors of anality and expurgation, the best black metal conjures a psychological and p... more

Race and ‘Disability Passing’ in a Chicago Public School Art Classroom

International Journal of Art & Design Education

Race, history and visibility have a great deal to do with how disability operated socially and ed... more Race, history and visibility have a great deal to do with how disability operated socially and educationally in the Chicago public high school art classroom where I taught for ten years. I am severely near-sighted, and I am also white, educated and often, but not consistently, able to pass for non-disabled. A large number of my students were identified as having learning, emotional and behavioural disabilities, diagnoses which were certainly conditioned by the institution, but diagnoses which perhaps also underrepresented the amount of socially and historically occasioned impairment or debility that existed in the low-income majority-Black community served by my school. In this article I reflect on the overlapping social performances that occurred in terms of &#39;disability passing&#39;, a state that can characterise both hidden and exaggerated or invented impairments. My reflections examine my own individual experience in contrast to the long-term experience of the African diaspora in and beyond the USA, in order to think about other ways to parse the complex factors determining how disability plays out in educational environments. Keywords critical race theory, critical disability studies, art education, urban public schools, race and special education, teacher autobiography What they don&#39;t know won&#39;t hurt me I am an educated, white, severely near-sighted man with thick contact lenses. I taught art for nearly a decade at neighbourhood public high school with a majority Black student body in a low-income neighbourhood on the south side of Chi-cago. I did not buck the housing segregation that defines urban space in the Midwest, meaning that I, like most of the teaching staff (white and nonwhite) lived far away from my job. On most work days, since I don&#39;t drive, I would ride my bike for half an hour to get downtown, and then take a forty-minute commuter train ride to the neighbourhood, where I would walk for about ten minutes to get to school. My walk to work was nearly always uneventful, but then I would get to

White Empathy and the Educational Neutralization of Hip-Hop

Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education

There are many reasons why the rich popular tradition of hip-hop culture has become attractive to... more There are many reasons why the rich popular tradition of hip-hop culture has become attractive to teachers as a means of engaging students, and many classroom experiments with hip-hop have surely met or surpassed the teacher’s curricular expectations. The political implications of such pedagogical appropriations are worth considering, however. I reflect in this article on my own experiences as a white art teacher and hip-hop enthusiast working with students of color in a large city. Drawing on Black Studies theorists associated with a tendency known as “Afro-pessimism,” I make larger connections between the philanthropic aspirations of white teachers like myself and the experiences of Black and brown students in American public schools, as well as the troubled history of sentimentalist anti-racist white mimicry in education and American culture more generally. While I used graffiti art in several lessons over the years, my most meaningful classroom encounter with hip-hop was whimsic...

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“Press charges”: The intersection of art class, white feelings, and the school-to-prison pipeline

The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 2021

I reflect on the decade I spent as an art teacher in a Chicago high school where so-called "behav... more I reflect on the decade I spent as an art teacher in a Chicago high school where so-called "behavioral issues" are rampant, as well on my experience working with incarcerated adults, in order to explain the concept of the school-to-prison pipeline with the aid of recent research on discipline and policing. I go on to talk about a September 2019 thread in an art teacher group on Facebook. On this thread, predominantly white teachers overwhelmingly called for a teacher who was hit while breaking up a fight to press charges against the student who struck him, purportedly for the students' own good. I examine all of these experiences in light of America's history of racial repression and control, and throughout the essay I reflect on the important role played by teachers' feelings in determining the material fates of students and their families

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Public school art teacher autonomy in a segregated city: Affordances and contradictions

The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 2019

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A Missouri author in a Roman law court: Pudd’nhead Wilson as an allegory of colourblind empire

Law and Humanities, 2017

In his novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, set in the later antebellum period but written after Reconstructi... more In his novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, set in the later antebellum period but written after Reconstruction, Mark Twain dramatizes the contradictions of the American racial hierarchy. In the story a light-skinned young man, born a slave but switched in the cradle with a free child, meets a tragic fate when his identity is revealed. The novel forms an unintentional bridge between the ancient Roman law of slavery, the foundation of much American slave law, and America’s contemporary ‘colourblind’ legal consensus, which coexists with a historically unprecedented, racially distorted system of mass incarceration. In ancient Rome, unlike the antebellum US, slaves carried no indelible visual markers of their status, and many were eventually freed. These conditions led to a great deal of legislation and litigation around status confusion, the legal matter at the heart of Pudd’nhead Wilson. A new form of status confusion exists in the US after emancipation; none are formally designated as slaves und...

“This is NOT okay:” Building a creative collective against academic ableism

Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 2021

Disabled university students, as well as disabled faculty, staff, and other community members, fa... more Disabled university students, as well as disabled faculty, staff, and other community members, face an array of challenges in conducting their studies and in navigating their daily lives. The authors relay their experiences as disabled members of a university community, and recount the work they did to gather information about the experiences of disabled people at the university, and to find a group intended to creatively and supportively address the shortcomings of the institution in meeting the needs of disabled people on campus. Throughout, the authors pay attention to the ways in which disability acts as a significant factor of marginalization for members of institutions, often in interaction with other marginalizing factors.

The Contractual Aesthetics of Sharecropping in Black Conceptualism

Critical Arts, 2020

The impersonal legal language of contracts, termed the "aesthetic of administration" by Benjamin ... more The impersonal legal language of contracts, termed the "aesthetic of administration" by Benjamin Buchloh, has had a strong impact on postwar conceptualist art. In the U.S., however, a two-tiered legal system explicitly existed from before the founding of the republic up through the end of Jim Crow, and, implicit in socalled "colorblind" legal discourse, continue to exist. Without claiming an exclusive status for Black conceptualist art, Black artists often employ a critical approach to the universalism assumed by the analytical ethos of conceptualism. Making use of text and performance, the works of artists Adrian Piper, Charles Gaines, William Pope.L, Glenn Ligon, and Cameron Rowland offer an archive of nuanced operationalised language. The hybrid practices of artists like Rick Lowe and Martine Syms spill over into curation, signalling an emphasis on administration as an avenue for accruing cultural capital. Black conceptual artists and Black curators can be framed within a history linked not to identity per se, but to a skepticism that expands and enriches the conceptualist tradition, while suggesting a need to transform systems by which cultural recognition is allocated.

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A Sentimental Art Education

Studies in Art Education, 2021

Sentimentalism as a genre is known for its association with melodramatic 19th-century novels, suc... more Sentimentalism as a genre is known for its association with melodramatic 19th-century novels, such as Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Alcott’s Little Women. But, as a cultural tendency, sentimentalism can be found in a range of 19th- and 20th-century cultural, social, and political phenomena, with philanthropic and educational projects chief among them. The legacy of sentimentalism in art education needs to be recalled when attempts are made to consider race in relation to K–12 art classrooms, as well as with class, disability, and gender dynamics. In this article, I make reference to the Hampton Album, a series of photographs taken in 1900 by Frances Benjamin Johnston, and I focus on three major thinkers to begin assessing the sentimental influence in art education, and gesturing at a pedagogical approach that more thoroughly integrates the role of ongoing conflicts and the intransigence of imbalances in power.

Albert Stabler

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