Museums and the Exclusion of the Disabled

The panel title of “Blind Spots” invites consideration of how institutions largely omit the disabled from narratives of art, diversity, and history. Judging from the sporadic announcements, it’s best to have people with disabilities in the galleries for a carefully scripted visit, documented with photos for a formulaic, self-congratulatory post on social media, and then to see these guests quickly out the door. This performative accessibility, as the museum profession would have it, largely liberates curators and administrators from including the disabled as subjects of exhibition programming or other measures of sustained institutional commitment. Feminists and ethnic minorities have identified economic and professional costs of museums’ exclusionary practices, which have not been the subject of redress for the disabled. Even decades after the passage of civil rights legislation, people with disabilities hardly register on the radar screens of able-bodied curators and administrators. For example, the ambitious “Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2018,” released by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Ithaka S+R, cited “inconsistent reporting” as the basis to excuse itself from analyzing the representation of the disabled in an assessment of, among other matters, “positions that are most directly responsible for presenting, interpreting, and caring for art objects.” With powerful institutions passively accepting a factor like “inconsistent reporting” as a basis for sidestepping the status of a marginalized group, the disabled likely will remain in museums’ “blind spot” for the foreseeable future.