Art for the Visually Impaired (2012)

Undergraduate: Leah Nelson

Faculty Advisor: Jim Hirschfield
Department: Art

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The art in museums and galleries stimulates the eyes and engages audiences visually. Viewers with visual impairments have less active roles in the gallery settings. I examine how professional galleries cater to this audience with the goal that this information would be implemented in a smaller scale exhibition on the university campus. I assess information on gallery practices involving visually impaired audiences as well as artistic practices conducive to multi-sensory perception. I collected information and interviewed curators and other researchers about the practical aspects of these techniques to see what works best and how they could be adapted.
Through the process of gathering information the idea of perception, including, visual memory and mental mapping became the primary factors that shifted my research. Visual memory is what a person with visual impairments remembers from the sighted world, if anything and mental mapping abilities are a person's ability to form a cohesive mental structure which correlates with a person’s subjective perception of the world. These aspects shifted my work from simply experiencing art to using art as a medium to connect to personal experiences and emotions. In order to express these ideas in art form I investigated structural techniques in art making and found that the artistic practices that were most conducive for tactility were multi-sensory pieces and those that incorporated practices for durability and accessibility.