The Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art is changing up the rules this weekend and encouraging the community to touch the artwork.
Visitors can experience Access Art, a special installation for members of the community who are blind or visually impaired to experience art, from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. Saturday.
“We pride ourselves in being accessible to visitors,” said Tami Wroath, the Harn’s director of marketing and public relations. “This is a great opportunity to connect with the visually impaired.”
The event will include a touchable installation in the museum’s auditorium and guided tours incorporating the tactile diagrams and verbal descriptions of the museum’s “Highlights from the Modern Collection” and “Monet and American Impressionism” exhibits. The guided tours require registration at harn.ufl.edu/accessart or by phone.
Artists in the community will display and talk about their art in the auditorium.
“The submissions for the touchable art exhibition are fantastic,” said Kim Crowell, who helped curate the artwork that will be displayed. “There is one in particular where the artist created touchable paintings of existing works in the Harn’s collection.”
Crowell, 27, a Harn intern and first-year UF museum studies graduate student, was involved in planning the event as well as creating the tactile diagrams of art displayed in the museum.
She said the diagrams are like touchable maps of works of art. Different textures on the diagram represent different areas within a painting or sculpture.
Another Harn intern, Kelly Simmons, wrote detailed verbal descriptions of six pieces of art on display at the museum. She said she had to look at the pieces for a long time to accurately describe what she saw.
The Gainesville chapter of the National Federation of the Blind held focus groups to make sure the tour materials, like the tactile diagrams and verbal descriptions, would work well for the community.
In the past, the Harn initiated other programs for the blind, such as a program called Mindsight that happened six times between 1999 and 2013, Wroath said.
Access Art will be the first event that combines touchable art, tactile diagrams and verbal descriptions.
Wroath said she hopes the event will become annual.
Saturday will also be the first day a cell phone-guided tour will be made available for the “Monet and American Impressionism” exhibit, Wroath said. This is another way the blind community can continue to enjoy the exhibit beyond Saturday’s event.
“I’m really excited for everything to come together and for people to be able to come to the Harn and experience it in a unique way,” Simmons said.
[A version of this story ran on page 8 on 3/20/2015 under the headline “Harn to host event for visually impaired”]
