Welcoming Art Lovers With Disabilities
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On a recent Friday night, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York held its first public exhibition of original art made in its “Seeing Through Drawing” classes. Participants — all blind or partly sighted — created works inspired by objects in the museum’s collection that were described to them by sighted instructors and that they were also allowed to touch.
In another gallery, a tour in American Sign Language was followed by a reception for deaf visitors. And on select Fridays, new “multisensory stations” invite all guests — including those with a range of disabilities — to experience exhibits though scent, touch, music and verbal imaging, or describing things for people with vision impairment.
“The Met has a long history of accessibility for people with disabilities,” said Rebecca McGinnis, who oversees access and community programs. As early as 1908, the museum provided a “rolling chair” for people with mobility issues, and in 1913 held talks for blind public school children, she said. Today, there are programs for people with disabilities nearly every day.
Such efforts by museums are likely to increase. In 2010, about 56.7 million people, or 18.7 percent of the population, had some level of disability, according to the Census Bureau. And both the number and percentage of disabled Americans are expected to increase in coming years because of the aging of the population, greater longevity and more cases of certain types of learning disabilities, said the Open Doors Organization, a nonprofit group in Chicago serving disabled people.
“Museum designers have used a great deal of imagination, much more than is required by law, and do remarkable things,” said Lex Frieden, a professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston and director of one of the regional centers to help compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
Mr. Frieden, whose spinal cord injury after a traffic crash in 1967 left him a quadriplegic, said museums made commitments to accessibility before the 1990 law and even earlier federal legislation. The Smithsonian Institution has long been a leader in the field; its definitive guidelines to accessible exhibition design are used globally, he said.
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