OPINION

No Rest for the Weary Why are some art spaces so physically hostile?

By JILLIAN STEINHAUER Artwork by JESSE TREECE

ONE OF THE BEST ART EXHIBITIONS I SAW LAST YEAR WAS PHENOMENAL NATURE: MRINALINI MUKHERJEE. The retrospective at the Met Breuer in New York introduced US audiences to the Indian artist’s masterful biomorphic fiber sculptures. Their dramatic impact (they are large, textured, and often richly colored) was heightened by an unusual exhibition design: a hanging gray curtain wound through the gallery, serving as a backdrop for strategically grouped works, while a matching path led viewers around the floor. The show was almost free of wall text. Proceeding through Phenomenal Nature felt like a journey of discovery—and by its end, I had discovered two important things: I love Mukherjee’s work, and the Met had neglected to provide a single chair or bench for visitors in the entire show.

The second observation was dispiriting but not exactly surprising. I often go to a museum or gallery only to find nowhere to sit down within view of the art, which might include videos that run upward of five minutes. When seats are available, they most often take the form of a single, hard, backless bench with room for about three people. In those moments, I wish I could conjure one of the artist Shannon Finnegan’s roomy, bright blue, custom-made museum benches bearing text that reads, “This exhibition has asked me to stand for too long. Sit if you agree.”

Why are some art spaces so physically hostile? This is a question that delves far beyond comfort into what the American Alliance of Museums identifies as issues of diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion. But discomfort is part of the picture—in a way, it’s a microcosm of a larger problem. If I, a straight, cis, white female art critic, albeit one with a bad back, can’t rest easy in art institutions, then who can?

The nature of American museums has changed greatly in the past half century. Writing in the journal Daedalus in 1999, longtime museum administrator Stephen E. Weil summarized this shift as the ongoing evolution of an

“establishment-like institution focused primarily inward on the growth, care, and study of its collection” into “a more entrepreneurial institution that . . . will have shifted its principal focus outward to concentrate on providing a variety of primarily educational services to the public.” In other words, museums have relatively new identities as public-facing social spaces, which helps explain their slowness to adapt to people’s, rather than objects’, needs. There are other reasons for the inhospitable nature of institutional space. Many art organizations represent a unique intersection of massive wealth, reverence for sleek appearances, and vestiges of outdated ideas about highbrow, “civilizing” culture. They lack diverse staff. They’re often “[Ablenationalism is] the way that able-bodiedness is made to seem natural, unmarked, and intrinsic to the imagination of US citizenship and culture.” —KEVIN GOTKIN, ARTIST AND RESEARCHER

designed by architects who continue to view accessibility as an afterthought. (In one recent high-profile example in New York City, Steven Holl Architects designed a $41.5 million new public library with terraced stacks, some of which are not accessible by way of the building’s sole elevator; a senior partner at the firm insisted that this was not “a flaw in the design” but rather “an evolution.”) And they exist within a society that subscribes to what disability scholars call “ablenationalism,” which was explained by artist and researcher Kevin Gotkin, who cofounded the activist group Disability/Arts/NYC, in the Avery Review as “the way that able-bodiedness is made to seem natural, unmarked, and intrinsic to the imagination of US citizenship and culture.”

All these factors have consequences. According to the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, only 6.6 percent of visitors to art museums and galleries were people with disabilities— representing only about half of the US population with disabilities (12 percent). Another NEA study, in 2015, found that for people with disabilities, “difficulty getting to the location was a noteworthy barrier” to attending exhibits, even those they wanted to see.

The mainstream art world is a province of the privileged, but art is made by and for everyone. It can give us pleasure and radically alter how we understand the world. Viewers with disabilities deserve equal access to such experiences. And if designers begin to plan galleries and museums with and for these viewers, the rest of us will benefit, too. h