CHRISTINE SUN KIM AT KENYON COLLEGE: IMPLEMENTING INCLUSIVE PROGRAMMING AND ACCESS.

“Diversity and inclusion” best practices are widely debated in the museum field and particular efforts should continue to concentrate on designing access for the disabled. Campus and community audiences met Christine Sun Kim’s Fall 2023 exhibition Oh Me Oh My at The Gund (Kenyon College’s teaching museum) with great enthusiasm. Celebrated in contemporary art circles and the Deaf community, Kim’s artwork explores the social, cultural, and non-auditory dimensions of sound from her perspective as a Deaf person in a hearing world. The clever humor of her aesthetically powerful and conceptually rigorous artistic language articulates alienation and inequity in an audio-centric world.

The Gund, committed to Kim’s advocacy for greater accessibility in the arts, is developing a 2023–24 calendar of events and programs including curricular engagements with the exhibition, a speaker series on accessibility in the arts, ASL-guided tours of The Gund’s exhibitions, and hands-on workshops focused on ASL expression and Deaf culture in collaboration with the Ohio School for the Deaf. While these endeavors are new for The Gund, the programs will lay groundwork for ongoing investment in implementing greater accessibility (physical, auditory, tactile, digital) for campus and community audiences. The same commitments guide The Gund’s Annex space for educational outreach, and the museum’s re-designed website.

Our presentation will explore the challenges, rewards, and lessons learned from launching a new educational and community-engagement program series devoted to reaching previously underserved audiences, collaborating with academic departments and community partners, and will meditate on how to improve upon the work done.