Date:
Location:
SOUND/TEXT
SPEAKER: Charles Eppley, Arizona State University
This presentation discusses the history of accessibility in U.S. museum and gallery curating prior to the creation of the 1990 Americans with Disability Act (ADA). It focuses on the story of the Lion’s Gallery of the Senses: a small multisensory gallery in Connecticut’s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art between 1972 and 1988. Examining its origins as a “gallery for the Blind,” this presentation reconsiders the gallery’s curatorial experiments in touch and sound as a creative, though not perfect, predecessor to the legally-mandated and top-down access guidelines ushered in by the ADA. The presentation argues that current explorations of “access artistry” by contemporary disabled artists (including creative approaches to image and sound description) reflect a grassroots response to the artistic, cultural, and political limitations of prescriptive legal models of access and inclusion first put into place in the 1990s. In contrast, pre-ADA historical precedents such as the Lion’s Gallery provide a complementary path forward to cultivate cultures of access and inclusion within museums from critical and creative community perspectives.
About the speaker
Charles Eppley (they/he) is an interdisciplinary art historian. They are currently an Assistant Teaching Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts & Performance (IAP) in the School of Humanities, Arts & Cultural Studies at Arizona State University. Prior to joining ASU, they held faculty positions at University of California at Riverside and Oberlin College, where they taught courses on contemporary art, disability studies, and media studies. They held research positions at MIT Media Lab, Nokia Bell Labs, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Their scholarship appears in the peer-reviewed journals Public Art Dialogue, Resonance: The Journal of Sound & Culture, Parallax, Leonardo, and the Journal of Media Art Study & Theory, and art publications like Rhizome, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic. They are an Editorial Board Member of Resonance, where they are editing a special multi-volume series on the topic of queer sonic art and the politics of listening. Finally, they are a researcher in the Proclaiming Disability Arts initiative at the NYU Center for Disability Studies led by Simi Linton and Mara Mills, where they are co-editing a book, Disability Arts, which documents and theorizes contemporary disability arts practices and politics.
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