BERKELEY, CA.- The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) presents Blind at the Museum, an exhibition on view in the museum’s Theater Gallery through July 24, 2005. Guest curated by Katherine Sherwood, Professor of Art Practice at U.C. Berkeley, and Beth Dungan, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Medicine, the Humanities, and Law, Blind at the Museum investigates the nature of blindness and the “visual arts” in works by numerous artists who probe the limits of optical experience.

An art museum would seem to be no place for the blind, as co-curators Sherwood and Dungan remind us. “Yet art objects address many sensory mechanisms — touch, hearing, scent, taste — and thus offer an opportunity to reconsider the process of ‘viewing’ or responding to art. Visual artists are often thinking about the very nature of vision: What does it mean to ‘see’? ... And what are the limits, or the liabilities, of the gaze?”

Blind at the Museum explores visual experience in works by Sophie Calle, a French artist known for her series on blindness; sculptor Robert Morris; multimedia artists Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Joseph Grigely; photographers John Dugdale and Alice Wingwall, and others. The artists in the exhibition address the nature of visual experience from a variety of perspectives: some emphasize sound, touch and multisensory experience; others probe the unreliability of vision, or rethink the process of viewing within a museum; yet others explore metaphors and stereotypes of blindness.

Works in the exhibition examine vision as a wide range of optical phenomena — such as floaters, peripheral vision, and distortion — that occur along a visual continuum. Photographer John Dugdale, for example, depicts optical aids, from eyeglasses to camera lenses that form part of his photographic process. Alice Wingwall’s photographs depict her lived experience of blindness, using panoramic cameras and other technologies to give a visual ‘warp’ to her images. With a background in sculpture and architecture as well as in photography, Wingwall invites the viewer to experience her renegotiation of beloved architectural sites in a series of photographs of her guide dog Joseph.

In this exhibition and at the related Conference (see below), the curators propose a rethinking of questions of ‘access,’ disability, and the museum. Prompted by recent disability rights legislation, museums around the world have attempted to make their collections more accessible, but this tends to relegate blind patrons to “special” programming and collections. Blind at the Museum addresses issues of intellectual access to visual art, such as: What is the relation between seeing and knowing, between words and images? How is blindness represented in visual art? How do artists with impaired sight represent visual experience? How does the idea of the “blind photographer” or “blind painter” question and change the museum as an environment for aesthetic judgment and experience? What role can technology play, as both tool and artistic medium, in the accessible museum of the future?

“Often, concerns about access address the physical environment and design — large font size, ramps — rather than diversifying perceptual and intellectual access to artwork,” write Sherwood and Dungan. “If technologies of vision (such as lenses) change our experience, if peripheral vision, blind spots, or floaters influence our notions of looking, how might alternative perspectives and technologies invite us to adopt new behaviors and approaches? As part of a larger movement of institutional critique, Blind at the Museum prompts us to reconsider the practice of looking within the museum, to imagine new ways of seeing and knowing for all viewers.”