NEW YORK, NY.- Imagine encountering Umberto Boccioni’s 1913 bronze sculpture “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” without being able to see it. A little over 3 1/2 feet tall, the abstract striding figure is all sharp edges and curves. On a Sunday in early March at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, a group of about 100 people, most of whom were blind or had low vision, put on thin plastic gloves and felt this and other sculptures. The tour was part of a celebration of 50 years of touch tours at the museum.

Abigail Shaw, who has been blind since birth, ran her hands over and around Boccioni’s sculpture, unable to identify at first what she was feeling. Jamie Mirabella, a teaching artist, told the small group the name of the artist, who was part of the Italian futurist movement, and the name of the sculpture.

But it wasn’t until Mirabella mentioned the date, which Shaw recognized as a time when industrialization was influencing modernism, that she began to “see” the piece and to understand that it was a figure in motion. “I could feel the energy,” she said, and “understood the artist’s attempt to reflect what a body looks like moving through space.”

Kevin Beauchamp, who has what he described as a very small field of “useful vision,” also commented on the Boccioni. Like Shaw, he could feel the shapes but couldn’t identify them.

“I wasn’t coming up with anything to help me figure out what this might be.” When Mirabella explained that it was a human figure, Beauchamp said, “I began piecing it together; this is the leg, the back leg that he’s pushing off with, and this is the thigh that he’s moving forward. I was able, once I knew what it was, to figure it out.”

Beauchamp, who was there with his partner, Howard Orlick, who is legally blind, said the MoMA tour was one of the best he’d participated in, in part because patrons were taken over the course of the afternoon, rather than in a single-timed event. Each small group was guided around the museum from one painting or sculpture to another, where they were allowed to touch the sculptures or heard descriptions of paintings.

Almost 33 years after the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act, going to a museum is still a challenge for someone with a disability. MoMA has been in the forefront of change: In addition to providing programs for people with a range of disabilities, the museum offers training to other institutions.

Some disabilities are easier than others to accommodate. Touch tours are fairly common. Shaw and Orlick both mentioned the Tenement Museum, which provides a scale model for people who are blind to examine before they head into the museum, and the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, which offers a tactile guide with raised images of some exhibitions and objects. For people who are deaf, tours in American Sign Language are inclusive, and for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, captioned audio guides and videos are essential; for those with hearing aids or cochlear implants, hearing-loop technology clarifies sound. Options are usually listed on a museum website’s accessibility page.




More challenging is accessibility for people with cognitive impairment, autism or sensory sensitivities. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Jewish Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art are among New York City museums offering gallery tours combined with studio sessions for adults and children on the autism spectrum. Meet Me at MoMA, a project for people with Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia, has inspired similar programs around the country. Guidelines for accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities include universal pictograms alongside written information.

MoMA also offered audio tours on that Sunday afternoon, part of its Art inSight program for people who are blind or have low vision, now in its 20th year. Annie Leist, a museum staffer and an artist and photographer herself, took a group to a brightly colored abstract diptych called “Wind and Water,” painted in 1975 by Suzanne Jackson.

Commissioned by Sonny Bono, of the musical pair Sonny and Cher, it reflects the psychedelic culture of the time and the spiritual symbolism of 1970s Afrocentrism, Leist explained. As she encouraged the group to contribute their own observations, the shapes of figures dancing across the canvas emerged, a purple bird, a fish in the dark at the bottom. “It’s a little like reading clouds,” Leist said.

Not everyone was able to see the painting. Orlick, who is also colorblind, said that the muted pastels meant that the painting was essentially just white for him. A painting with strong color contrast is more accessible. “If someone says ‘this is a deep blue sky,’ that means more to me than this is a blue sky,” he said. “It’s like watching a black and white movie. I understand the color cognitively instead of perceptionally.”

“MoMA stands out as an institution that shows a deep commitment to their disabled visitors,” Kirsten Sweeney, co-chair of the steering committee for New York’s Museum, Arts and Culture Access Consortium (MAC), said in an email interview. (She is also accessibility and inclusion manager at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.) Sweeney praised MoMA’s training programs, which include a series of videos filmed while the museum was closed during the pandemic, in which people with disabilities talk about their museum experiences. These videos are used to train staff including security, retail, and of course guides, and are shared with other cultural institutions.

MAC runs training programs for museum personnel and includes an events calendar on its website featuring accessible arts and culture events in the city.

New York’s Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities (MoPD) has a comprehensive guide to museum accessibility on its website.

For a more personal look at museum access, there is the website and podcast Accessible Travel NYC, created by Lakshmee Lachhman-Persad. She and her sister, Annie Lachhman, who uses a wheelchair and has dystonic cerebral palsy, share their own New York adventures. They cover a wide range of topics, often with humor.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.