Accessible Buildings, Inaccessible Artworks: Reconsidering Disability in the Museum

Since the 1990s, museums have made significant strides ensuring that their buildings are accessible to visitors with physical disabilities. Yet despite this progress, many museums continue to display artworks within an ocularcentric setting that remains inaccessible to disabled spectators. Equally unacknowledged are the ableist ideas that have shaped the creation of artworks and, in many cases, get perpetuated through normative conceptions of bodies that underpin museum display practices.

The tendency to exhibit inaccessible art in otherwise accessible buildings is perhaps most glaring in displays of participatory artworks made from the 1950s onward. However, it is equally apparent in the display of much earlier works presented from the perspective of a “median” body—works that often were historically used and experienced by a far more diverse range of spectators.

This panel seeks to develop a more critical history of museums that offer “barrier-free” access to their buildings while displaying artworks in ways that remain inaccessible to disabled visitors. To this end, we invite papers that consider different facets of this ableist history across all types of museums. A non-exhaustive list of potential topics includes: close readings of exhibits that have featured inaccessible artworks; the museum’s (inadvertent) erasure of disability experiences in history; attempts by artists or others to challenge the tendency to display inaccessible artworks; or the ostensibly “radical” solutions proposed to develop more inclusive display approaches that depart from a maker’s original intention or prioritize narrative over objecthood—approaches that may overwrite contexts or marginalize intentions in an attempt to share more ethical interpretations with audiences.

Session Convenors:

Felix Jäger, Courtauld Institute of Art

Michael Tymkiw, University of Essex

Speakers:

Amanda Cachia, University of Houston

Smoke & Mirrors at the Zimmerli Art Museum

In this presentation, I will share a recent major curatorial project I developed entitled Smoke and Mirrors, which included the work of 14 contemporary disabled artists for the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Jersey in Fall 2024. The exhibition focused on issues of accessibility and explored a new artistic genre called “access aesthetics,” which considers how artists make transparent the inequities in museums. For the able-bodied visitor, wayfinding through an exhibition can be a straightforward experience with few obstructions. For visitors with disabilities, however, such experiences are challenging and the barriers they face are often invisible or unnoticed. In Smoke & Mirrors, artists offer work that conceptualizes access through humor, antagonism, transparency, and invisibility. Access aesthetics centers access as a medium that contemporary disabled artists use as a political strategy. Access becomes the subject matter in concert with being the guiding principle for the design of exhibitions that offer new registers for exhibition spectatorship. Access aesthetics balances between form and function, using translation, sensory aesthetics, touch, movement and exhibition design as its principal mediums for challenging ocularcentrism and other inaccessible modalities of so-called participation in the museum. The exhibition is an important companion to the recent release of my first monograph, The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique (2024), where many of the included videos, drawings, sculptures, textiles, and multi-media installations are discussed and provide a complex interpretation of access aesthetics. The artists included were Emanuel Almborg, Alt-Text as Poetry, Erik Benjamins, Pelenakeke Brown, Fayen d’Evie, JJJJJerome Ellis, Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Sugandha Gupta, Carmen Papalia, Finnegan Shannon, Liza Sylvestre, Aislinn Thomas, Corban Walker, and Syrus Marcus Ware.

Nesli Gül Durukan, Independent curator, researcher and art writer

Dialogical Practices in Contemporary and Modern Art Museums

Dialogical practices in art museums have become increasingly significant as institutions strive to engage with their communities and address contemporary social issues. Projects such as “Tate Encounters” at Tate Modern, “M HKA is into Summer!” at M HKA, and “Delinking and Relinking” at the Van Abbemuseum highlight the importance of dialogue between museums, their collections, exhibits, and audiences. This research aims to explore how contemporary and modern art museums employ dialogical practices to engage visitors, foster critical thinking, and promote inclusive narratives, as well as how museums incorporate their collections, archives, and histories into this process. By examining the methods and strategies used to facilitate dialogue, this research will provide insights into the educational, social, and cultural impacts of these practices for the accessibility and inclusiveness of museum history and practices.

This research begins with an examination of exhibition displays in modern and contemporary art museums. Preliminary findings indicate a lack of sufficient theoretical studies on dialogical practices within museum studies and art history. Notable exceptions include works by Christiane Oved Særkjær (2024) on visitor voices as a dialogic mode in museum communication, Foteini Venieri (2022) on facilitated dialogue in museums, and Leanne Unruh (2015) on dialogical curating for Aboriginal self-representation.

This research seeks to explore how contemporary and modern art museums use dialogical practices to engage visitors, foster critical thinking, and promote inclusive narratives, thereby opening up more accessible experiences for diverse audiences, including people with disabilities, minorities, and children.

Renato Trotta, University of St Andrews

Visual Impairment, Museums, and the Gentle Disruption of Authority

Museums should undergo substantial changes to accommodate requests for more access. While this needs to account for the realities of museum management and the various obstacles imposed by resources and partnerships, a radical rethinking of display is widely endorsed. Disability has the potential to drive innovation in museum practice, and activism has largely informed policies toward increased access. This is because people with disabilities are the primary users of accessible solutions, and thus invaluable stakeholders for co-production. However, it is evident that the elimination of physical or structural barriers is not enough. The challenge of co-production is most evident between museums and blind and partially sighted (BPS) audiences. BPS’ access requirements put them at odds with the traditional nature of museums, that of conservation and education, a challenge mostly due to museums’ outlasting implementation of an ocularcentric paradigm for both display and education. Best practices attempt to curb shortcomings, but it is clear that an overarching system is absent. This paper aims to showcase how the presence of BPS in museums radically challenges established paradigms, by implementing historiographical accounts on alternative experiential modalities and Thomson’s “blindness gain” model into a broader understanding of museum accessibility. The immediate outcome is a restructuring of museums’ authority, but far from a disruptive prospect, I argue that this could be perceived as a positive asset for modern considerations on museums. Despite this analysis being grounded in museum theory, it will also promote an interdisciplinary approach, adopting psychology, neurophysiology, and empirical aesthetics as methodological stances.

Alex Cowan with Felix Jäger and Michael Tymkiw

A Conversation with Alex Cowan, Shape Arts

Together with the session conveners, archivist Alex Cowan explores the heritage, politics, and presentation of disability arts and activism in the UK. Two collections will be at the center of this conversation: the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive (2019), which preserves the creative heritage of the Disability Arts Movement in the 1980s and 1990s, and the National Disability Movement Archive and Collection (2025/2026), which is planned to showcase the visual and material legacies of the Disability Peoples’ Rights Movements from the 1970s to the present. The conversation will consider the wider stakes of artistic practices in creating community within the disability arts and rights movements, and their roles in rallying support and opening minds among non-disabled people. It will also consider some challenges involved in preserving and exhibiting such materials today, and how new strategies for accessibility address the diversity of experiences they encapsulate while continuing to advocate for greater inclusivity in society writ large. By examining such issues, the conversation ultimately seeks to ask how the two collections under consideration here may serve as models to reimagine other archives, collections, and museums for diverse audiences.