Greater than the Sum: Curating Access on Campus

Institutions of higher education have a fraught relationship to access—while fundamentally concerned with creating open educational spaces for the campus community, such sites are also delimited by design, producing membership through exclusion. The “steep steps” metaphor, coined by Jay Dolmage, encapsulates this challenge: social hierarchies and models of academic excellence are inextricable from the vertical terrain of campus landscape and architecture, purposely inaccessible to those who cannot ascend the (often literal) steep steps. Art on campus, and its politics of display, is necessarily part of this terrain. As a critical site where art, access and education intersect, the university museum or gallery can platform art accessibility as a novel mode of practice, process and pedagogy.

This paper will highlight recent exhibitions, collaborations and initiatives at Colgate University’s art museums in relation to student-lead curation, creative practice, and campus accessibility efforts. Two primary examples will be the focus: first, a student proposed and designed gallery ramp, developed as a group project in our “Disability Media” course, that was subsequently integrated and built in the gallery’s renovation; second, a student designed exhibition website, created for a student-curated exhibition Gestalt: Greater Than the Sum, with the purpose of expanding access to the exhibition’s visual works. The latter emphasized multi-sensory access and included visual descriptions of each work, written and recorded by students, as well as sensory translations such as tactile 3D prints and composed soundscapes.