Please Touch The Art
| By Jamie Thomas |
|
In a museum there’s one unspoken rule that’s everywhere. It’s in the blinking red light of the security camera. It’s written into the furrow of a gallery guard’s brow. It’s posted on a sign in an unsmiling font: “Do Not Touch.” But touch is exactly what docents at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts want patrons to do on special tours that allow visitors to don white gloves and feel up the art.
Tours that allow people with impaired vision to touch art have been part of the museum’s education program for more than 15 years, says Debbi Hegstrom, a docent educator at the M.I.A. But in recent years, the museum has instituted four or five annual “touch tours,” open to the sighted and non-sighted alike. One such tour was announced in October via the M.I.A.’s Twitter account, but visitors can call ahead to set up a touch tour anytime.
Such tours make sense at a museum where increasing accessibility to art is priority number one. Entrance to the M.I.A.’s regular collection is free year round and the museum offers monthly tours in American Sign Language. But the touch tours are different, because they allow participants to put their hands on items that are normally off limits to our dirty mitts.
Minneapolis resident Juliette Silvers, who has been blind since birth, enjoys the touch tours so much that she’s participated in three over the past year. “When I was growing up, it was always ‘don’t touch, don’t touch,’ and touch is so much of learning what something is,” she says.
Silvers finds it easiest to get a sense of smaller-scale sculptures with common shapes, such as human or animal figures. She conceptualizes what the pieces look like by comparing them to things she touches every day.
“I try to associate it with something in my own life. For instance, everything is a cat. I have two cats, so I’m most familiar with how they feel.”
Museum curators determine which sculptures the public is allowed to touch. The list of 34 “pre-approved” items includes ancient Greek and Roman marble sculptures, period furniture and cast bronze pieces by Picasso and Matisse.
There are also two paintings made accessible to the blind through “tactile diagrams” that resemble a piece of white card stock with the painting’s main elements reproduced in raised black print. Different textures give a sense of the painting’s colors, depth and even brushstrokes.
As part of my mini-touch tour, Hegstrom let me feel Picasso’s “Baboon and Young” sculpture, a playfully tender figure of a mother baboon embracing her baby. Picasso assembled the piece using clay, found objects and toys and then cast it in bronze. For years, I’d been fascinated by the baboon’s head, modeled on a toy car. As I ran my fingers over the toy headlights that double as her nostrils, I realized Picasso’s fingertips had been there as well. I imagined the then-70-year-old artist building this sculpture out of toys and objects from his studio while his young wife and children played nearby.
By giving visually impaired patrons like Juliette Silvers the opportunity to touch the art, M.I.A. is helping them experience these works for the first time. But touch tours also provide the sighted like myself a deeper way to connect with the pieces we may have looked at a million times before.
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
2400 3rd Ave, Mpls.
Call M.I.A. at least four weeks in advance to schedule a touch tour.
Tour Office: 612.870.3140
Tours that allow people with impaired vision to touch art have been part of the museum’s education program for more than 15 years, says Debbi Hegstrom, a docent educator at the M.I.A. But in recent years, the museum has instituted four or five annual “touch tours,” open to the sighted and non-sighted alike. One such tour was announced in October via the M.I.A.’s Twitter account, but visitors can call ahead to set up a touch tour anytime.
Such tours make sense at a museum where increasing accessibility to art is priority number one. Entrance to the M.I.A.’s regular collection is free year round and the museum offers monthly tours in American Sign Language. But the touch tours are different, because they allow participants to put their hands on items that are normally off limits to our dirty mitts.
Minneapolis resident Juliette Silvers, who has been blind since birth, enjoys the touch tours so much that she’s participated in three over the past year. “When I was growing up, it was always ‘don’t touch, don’t touch,’ and touch is so much of learning what something is,” she says.
Silvers finds it easiest to get a sense of smaller-scale sculptures with common shapes, such as human or animal figures. She conceptualizes what the pieces look like by comparing them to things she touches every day.
“I try to associate it with something in my own life. For instance, everything is a cat. I have two cats, so I’m most familiar with how they feel.”
Museum curators determine which sculptures the public is allowed to touch. The list of 34 “pre-approved” items includes ancient Greek and Roman marble sculptures, period furniture and cast bronze pieces by Picasso and Matisse.
There are also two paintings made accessible to the blind through “tactile diagrams” that resemble a piece of white card stock with the painting’s main elements reproduced in raised black print. Different textures give a sense of the painting’s colors, depth and even brushstrokes.
As part of my mini-touch tour, Hegstrom let me feel Picasso’s “Baboon and Young” sculpture, a playfully tender figure of a mother baboon embracing her baby. Picasso assembled the piece using clay, found objects and toys and then cast it in bronze. For years, I’d been fascinated by the baboon’s head, modeled on a toy car. As I ran my fingers over the toy headlights that double as her nostrils, I realized Picasso’s fingertips had been there as well. I imagined the then-70-year-old artist building this sculpture out of toys and objects from his studio while his young wife and children played nearby.
By giving visually impaired patrons like Juliette Silvers the opportunity to touch the art, M.I.A. is helping them experience these works for the first time. But touch tours also provide the sighted like myself a deeper way to connect with the pieces we may have looked at a million times before.
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
2400 3rd Ave, Mpls.
Call M.I.A. at least four weeks in advance to schedule a touch tour.
Tour Office: 612.870.3140
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