Disability, Accessibility, and Artistry

With the concurrent Renwick Gallery exhibitions, Reforestation of the Imagination, by Ginny Ruffner, and Michael Sherrill Retrospective, showcasing a lifetime of work by Michael Sherrill, visitors were given the opportunity to experience artworks by artists living with disability. Ruffner is a glass artist and painter who was in a severe car accident in 1991 that left her in a coma for five weeks. Recovering from the coma and brain injury changed her working style, but not her artistic drive. Michael Sherril is dyslexic, and beyond his clay and metal sculptures, has developed his own line of clay tools to manipulate materials in a way that works better for him and many others. With these paired exhibitions, I presented a session of Mornings at the Museum in partnership with our Accessibility Office to give our youngest audience a chance to see themselves reflected in the galleries of a museum. In this iteration of the program, we showed how each artist changed their working style to accommodate themselves and, in some ways, created their own rules and ways to make the art they envisioned in their head. We used Ruffner and Sherrill’s work as a launching pad for our visitors to see themselves as artists. We built on this by giving program participants tools, such as modeling clay, popsicle sticks, markers, and glue, to create their own art. The result was delighted participants, who saw themselves as artists and that they too could one day have work in a museum.