How a Blind Professor Is Helping Other Sight-Impaired Museum Visitors Experience Art

Most recently, Georgina Kleege led tours at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, where visitors handled materials that artists had used in their work.

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Over the past decade Georgina Kleege has offered consultations to art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Tate Modern, on how to make their art accessible for blind people. An English professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Kleege recently published More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art, a book about how blindness is represented in art and how it affects the lives of visual artists. Kleege, who is blind and has been on many touch tours of museums, has long seen the potential for institutions to do more. The daughter of a painter and a sculptor, she grew up going to artists’ studios, galleries, and museums, and has advocated for such spaces to go beyond ramps and ADA compliance.  

Her most recent project, which she called “Haptic Encounters,” took place at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. For the exhibit Jewish Folktales Retold: The Artist as Maggid, she developed six audio recordings where she relates the folklore that the pieces were based on, as well as describing how the artworks feel, from rough and sandpaper-like, to wooden and splintery. In addition, she invited featured artists to share models and materials of their art for people to handle. According to Kleege, this emphasis on the texture of materials and how they inform an artist’s vision is unusual among tours for the blind. And there’s another key difference: tours and audio recordings are almost exclusively done by sighted people; to have them led by a blind person is unique.

On a tour of the exhibit, participants handled silicon squash, a material used in Michael Arcega’s sculpture, “The Enchanted Island,” inspired by a story about a shipwrecked rabbi going into a mansion and finding two objects on a table: a cornucopia and a ram’s horn, to summon people to prayer. Visitors also held an animal’s head made from the leftover materials that Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor had after making her monumental sculptures based on Golem, on view at the museum. Kleege stresses how visitors to art museums, both sighted and not, long to touch the art. At the Contemporary Jewish Museum, people exclaimed over the rare chance to handle the materials.

Later, in her office on the Berkeley campus, Kleege talked about what she learned growing up with artists as parents, what it means for a museum to be truly inclusive, and how she’d like everyone to touch the art.

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