About five years ago, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts took on an ambitious goal: to create a tour within the museum that was accessible to those who are visually impaired. This was tricky for a number of reasons. The most pressing issue was that the KIA specializes in visual art. So how do you take an visual medium, and bring it alive for someone who can’t see it? KIA docents Frank Wolf and Tracy Klinesteker will give a talk on March 22nd explaining how the museum did it.
For a lot of museums, the approach is to simply print out a piece of paper with a few descriptions of the art in braille. But Klinesteker says the KIA wanted something more interactive – something where visitors could touch and feel the art through specific kinds of three-dimensional sculptures.
"They are allowed to feel the texture, feel the temperature of it," Klinesteker says. "Feel the differences in the contrast. How big, how tall, how wide, how rough, how smooth. They gather all that information with their hands. So it makes their experience much more engaging with the art than if they were just read braille, or read the braille themselves."
Docent Frank Wolf says selecting the right pieces is challenging. There’s a tricky balancing act, he says. It needs to be durable enough for people to hold up to the touch. You want it to be complex and interesting, he says, but also something you can figure out with your hands.:
"When we show a piece, there are two things we don’t want to do. One, we don’t want to completely describe the piece and say, now go ahead and touch it. And on the other hand, this isn’t a contest. We don’t want to just say here’s a sculpture and make them figure it out, become frustrated. So what we try to do is walk the line between giving too much information and too little information."
Klinesteker shows an example of this through a piece in the Touch Art exhibit by local artist Paul Ponchillia, called “Kluane.”
On a large piece of wood sits a giant eagle carved out of a moose antler. Next to it, there’s a small, smooth bear, gently shaped out of soapstone. It’s this range of textures, she says – the roughness of the antler versus the smoothness of the stone -- that makes this work.
"So you have this really smooth bear and rough anchor," she says, rubbing the scratchy antler. "They just take the gloves. And they feel the piece, the feathers, the leather."
Eventually, Klinesteker says, you can pull all these textures together and get a real interpretation of the sculpture. And once that happens, the docents can start asking the tough questions. What’s the mood of the piece? What does it mean?
"It empowers the visually impaired people," she says. "Because when they come, they can have access to the thoughts and the feelings and the emotions. Everything. Just like everybody else. So it allows them to really express themselves as well. Because now they can see, touch, hear, whatever, all these pieces of art that were really shut out from them."
But Klinesteker says there’s still a bigger challenge to overcome. The KIA has a limited Touch Art tour now, but it wants to show more. In particular, she says, the museum is searching for ways to make two-dimensional art, like paintings and portraits, accessible.
The ideas are still in the early stages, she says, but they’re thinking about processes like 3-D printing and using a material called “swell paper.”
"It allows them to really express themselves as well. Now they can see, touch, hear this art that can be shut out from them."
"Which is a paper that you draw on," she says. "It swells up, it makes a ridge. And doing that in the shape of the painting itself, then they would explore that paper. So it would give them a basic idea of what’s on the canvas."
Klinesteker and Wolf touch on other ideas, too. They talk about "quilts" of famous works, a process first proposed by artist Rebecca Barker. The idea is to create a replica of a famous work while using specific materials to represent specific colors (i.e. corduroy equals brown, linen equals blue). That way, through touch, a visually impaired person can "color between the lines" in their own way.
The ideas are all still in early stages, but the docents say they're all part of an effort to welcome the greater community to the KIA in a new way.
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