December 6, 2006

For Namtip in regards to a museum for the blind

In June 2002, being that this was a number of years ago the details are kind of fuzzy, I took my friend of mine, who has been blind since birth, to the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. The Brandywine River Museum is largely a painting museum, and, being associated with the With Studio, it has a particularly large collection of landscape paintings by Andrew Wyeth.

While walking through the museum with my friend, I concentrated on describing the paintings through their textures and atmospheres: things she could understand through the way she experiences the world. I found Wyeth’s landscapes particularly helpful for this because of the sensory richness of his work. In other words, even through they were paintings, which are meant to be experienced visually; I found their content could be described in terms of non-visual sensations.

Cold Spring, Andrew Wyeth, 1988, dry brush

Perhaps in designing your museum, you could select a number of pieces of flat art work (paintings, photographs, etc) and write itineraries of sensory/spatial experiences through the works. Then maybe you could use these itineraries to inform how you make the spaces of the museum. In effect, each space could display a piece (for the sighted) and moving through the space provides a “description” for each piece displayed (for the non-sighted). If you were to look at more abstract artwork, rather than realist art like Wyeth’s, your itineraries through them may be more spatial than sensual. In which case you might be able to architecturally describe the art by somehow making the spaces you find in the artwork and adding additional sensory experiences that activate those spaces for the non-sighted.