AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

Museums and other cultural heritage sites are working hard to attract and welcome more diverse audiences.  This talk will examine ways in which conservators can be a resource for finding and expanding the common ground between best visitor experiences and best practices in caring for collections.  The particular research to be presented is focused on improving access for visitors with blindness and partial blindness but, as in other contexts, an improvement intended for one group often extends well beyond that.

Art conservators are often the ones who have to balance the competing priorities of visitor access and protecting collections.  In museum settings this may translate to stanchions, platforms, vitrines, guards, alarms and “Please do not touch” signs.  But as any museum professional knows, people love to touch and feel things.  For people with visual impairments, being able to touch and feel the art is one of a limited set of options for experiencing the collection.  

Like other museums, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (ISGM) in Boston, offers guided touch tours for visitors with visual impairments; however, these tours are generally limited to a select group of three-dimensional objects.  Unlike sighted visitors, blind visitors do not have the opportunity to engage with two-dimensional works of art that typically hang framed on gallery walls.   

In response to the limitations of touch tours and a mid-career “itch”, in 2024 I applied for and received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award to the University of Dundee in Scotland.  The subject of my work was to research ways of advancing the accessibility of two-dimensional works of art such as paintings, prints, drawings or photographs that have historically been excluded from museum touch tours.  At the university I was situated in an interdisciplinary studio within the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, called Studio Ordinary.  Studio Ordinary is a place where design research and disability studies come together so design can be used as a tool to change the conversation around disability.  

While the focus of my work was outside of the explicit confines of art conservation, I approached my research by centering on my deep experience as a practicing art conservator and the knowledge of materials that comes with that.  That experience and knowledge opened many doors, making it possible to collaborate with and learn from a range of colleagues including disability scholars, designers, artists, technology experts and members of the blind community.  I will show examples of prototypes we produced in Scotland, share the ways in which my project evolved to include multi-sensory experiences, and how this work is moving forward in Boston.