Pioneers such as the MoMA, the Manchester Museum, capito Mecklenburg-Vorpommern or the KHM and the Konzerthaus in Austria show how art and culture can be made accessible to everyone.
The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA in New York, has been offering art to people with disabilities since the 1940s. That was when the War Veterans' Art Center was created to offer free art classes to disabled veterans, reports Francesca Rosenberg - Director, Access Programs and Initiatives: "MoMA continues this legacy by providing direct access to art to thousands of people with disabilities each year."
A MoMA for everyone
Accessibility and equal treatment are so important at MoMA that an accessibility task force has even been set up, with representatives from all departments and areas of the museum. Rosenberg: "Making art accessible to as many people as possible can be a wonderful opportunity to think about exhibition design and the way visitors experience art."
In 2018, MoMA was awarded a Zero Project Award. MoMA also participated in the first Zero Project Impact Transfer program, which aims to act as an accelerator to support innovative and scalable solutions for a barrier-free world.
Art to touch
The Manchester Museum was one of the Zero Project Awardees in 2014, having been awarded for the interactive research project "Haptic Probos". It was initiated in 2008 by Sam Beath, now Conservation and Collection Care Manager at the University of Manchester Museum. Beath: "The development began in the 1990s, when we were researching innovative 3D scanning and haptic technologies at the National Liverpool Museum."
Initially, the focus was on conservation applications. "But we soon realized that this could give museum visitors physical access to faithful replicas of objects and that this could also lead to innovative approaches to inclusion," Beath recalls. By 2017, four objects had been added to the Probos library, including Gustav Klimt's "The Kiss" - a project that was realized as part of an Erasmus+ project and with the participation of Austrian, German and Slovak partners.
Inclusive art education
capito Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (capito MV), a specialist in barrier-free communication, trains people with disabilities to become art mediators in museums together with the State Museum in Schwerin and was awarded a Zero Project Award for this in 2020. By 2022, eight people had been qualified at the State Museum in Schwerin and the Castle Museum in Ludwigslust in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
A full-time qualification is currently being developed, reports Nils Wöbke, head of capito MV: "The project shows its social and individual impact in many different ways. People with disabilities work in a public museum location and carry out a qualified, public and visible task. This project gives people with disabilities new access to education, volunteering and the world of work." Interested museums can use the knowledge and experience from the project through workshops or courses. As part of the Zero Project Impact Transfer Program 2020, the prototype for an inclusive qualification manual was also developed.
Pioneering work from Austria
In Austria, the Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM) is one of the pioneers of inclusive art education, reports Rotraut Krall, head of the art education department in the KHM Museum Association: "As early as 1952, the then director of the Egyptian-Oriental Collection invited blind people to touch objects with gloves." In 2010, according to Krall, this thread was taken up again with her appointment: "It was recognized that inclusive art education was becoming very important and a separate position was created for it." One of her first projects was the creation of tactile reliefs of works from the Gemäldegalerie - an idea that she developed together with the Viennese VRVis Center for Virtual Reality and Visualization Research GmbH.
Further ideas and projects such as the inclusive museum book "Seeing things differently together!" followed until the KHM was invited to participate in ARCHES ("Accessible Resources for Cultural Heritage EcoSystems") in 2016. The project, funded by the EU as part of HORIZON 2020, brought together twelve European partners from the fields of culture - including six of the leading museums -, technology and science, as well as people with disabilities to "jointly identify and develop innovations that make visiting cultural institutions easier for people with disabilities," says Krall. In addition to the implementation of further reliefs and tactile museum plans, an app was developed that supports navigation and learning about the exhibits in the museums. In 2020, ARCHES and the KHM were awarded a Zero Project Award.
Where music connects everyone
In 2023, the Vienna Konzerthaus will receive a Zero Project Award for the inclusive "Summer Music Week", which has existed since 2019. In keeping with the motto "Music connects", the free offer is aimed at everyone and aims to "enable a lively and authentic dialogue between stage and audience, regardless of social background and education, ethnicity or disability," explains Mira Possert, Education Manager at the Vienna Konzerthaus. You don't even need an instrument to take part, the only thing that matters is enthusiasm for music.
Participants can choose between workshop groups with different content. However, the first four days begin with a joint session, and lunch in the group is also intended to encourage interaction and create a creative togetherness. On the fifth day, rehearsals are held for the final evening concert and the ensembles are formed. Possert: "This shows that the group's supposed inhomogeneity is one of its greatest strengths."
by Friedrich Ruhm Perdomo