I was pleased that the 2025 Turner Prize was won by Nnena Kalu, an autistic artist whose work is bold and unapologetically expressive. Charlotte Hollinshead, who worked with Kalu for years, described her win as “seismic”, stating it had broken a very stubborn glass ceiling. The deeply expressive art Nnena creates has sent a clear message-learning disabilities and autism are no barrier to success.
Inevitably, one esteemed critic dismissed Kalu’s work being the worst he had seen, accusing the judges of “virtue signalling” implying the prize was awarded not for merit but out of pity.
The response felt depressingly familiar, when outsider or neurodivergent art dares to enter elite spaces, suspicion follows. Is this “real” art, or is it being smuggled in under the banner of inclusion?
This has a history. Autistic artists and artists with learning disabilities are routinely sidelined by an art world that often presents itself as edgy and radical while defending rigid hierarchies. It seems that outsider art is tolerated, but only at a distance. When it moves too close to the centre, the old snobbery surfaces.
A few years ago, when Project Art Works was shortlisted for the Turner Prize its CEO was told by a museum professional that artists with learning disabilities should not be in the same building as “artists of calibre”. The comment was undisguisedly about protecting territory.
Kalu’s win matters because it unsettles an unspoken order and challenges the notion that artistic value must look and sound a certain way to be taken seriously. It also brings into focus the idea of the capital A Artist.
The capital A Artist is the officially approved version of what an artist should be. Typically white, often male, middle-class, well-spoken, highly educated, and supported by institutions. Their work fits comfortably into galleries and museums and can be neatly explained using the language of the art world.
This points to how the art world elevates some while sidelining others whose work does not fit the template, outsider artists, disabled artists, neurodivergent artists, and those without cultural privilege.
Rebekah does not conform to an approved art model, not shaped by elite institutions, not reliant on academic language to justify her work, and it does not move easily within established art-world networks.
Her work exists outside those systems not because it lacks seriousness or depth, but because they are not designed to include artists like her.
Rebekah thrives on the outside, her work original and free of insider rules. Her work stands on its own: vibrant, alive and entirely her own.
