[Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools] Artist,exhibition,Accessibi lity

[Louise Brasher]

Thanks!

-----Original Message-----
From: Lisa Yayla [mailto:fnugg at online.no]
Sent: Saturday, August 14, 2004 3:41 AM
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Subject: [Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools]
Artist,exhibition,Accessibility


Hi,
Three articles. One about exhibition in New Zealand, second
about arts and accessibility.
For this one was unable to copy text directly, so had to
take from source code, sorry
did not clean up all the tags here (bit of a hurry) and a
blind Toronto artist Susan Kealey
and exhibition at the Charles H. Scott Gallery until
September 12.
Regards,
Lisa


http://www.odt.co.nz/cgi-bin/getitem?date=09Aug2004&object=0808125652&type=h
tml
Exhibition organised for the blind to experience
Some art asks to be touched
Auckland: Julie Woods-Dalloway, of Dunedin, has never seen a
piece of art before but at the weekend
she got to feel one instead.

The 38-year-old blind woman was among those who attended the
opening of the country's first art
display designed to make the visual arts accessible to the
blind community.

"It's good to go to a gallery where they ask you to touch
rather than not to touch," Ms Woods-Dalloway
said.

Auckland artist Glenn Heenan (28) put the "More than
Looking" exhibition together so blind people
could enjoy art.

He was inspired to do it after his grandmother lost her
sight.

He selected a dozen images from a photojournalism book he
had been researching and approached
some of the country's well-known poets to write about the
scenes depicted. They included Keri Hulme,
Glenn Colquhoun and Ruth Dallas.

The writings were then put into Braille and the photos were
blown up and embossed with the contours of the image.

The exhibition is at Te Tuhi gallery in Pakuranga until
August 29. - NZPA

http://examiner.gmnews.com/news/2004/0812/Front_Page/003.html

Accessible arts facilities make it possible for people with
handicaps to participate fully in the arts. Illustration
from "Design for Accessibility: A Cultural Administrator's
Handbook."
One out of every five Americans has some level of
disability, including 38 million individuals who are
severely disabled, according to the 1997 U.S. Census Bureau
report. The federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
prohibits discrimination and ensures equal opportunity for
persons with disabilities in the areas of employment, state
and local government services, public accommodations,
commercial facilities, transportation and
telecommunications.  
 Passed on July 26, 1990, the ADA has had a wide-ranging
effect on local arts groups who are covered under the
"public accommodation" section of the act.  
 "The New Jersey State Council on the Arts has been a
big proponent of groups looking at the spirit not just the
letter of the law to reach out and make the arts more
accessible," according to Monmouth County Arts Council
Executive Director Mary Eileen Fouratt, who views compliance
with the act as a "win-win situation."   
 "The more people we invite in, the more we strengthen
the arts' place as an integral part of the community, "
Fouratt said.  
 A critical component of inviting people in is making sure
they can gain access to the places that house art.   
 "New construction is very easy," said Guy Gsell,
managing director of the Two River Theatre Company currently
under construction in Red Bank. "None of the things you
have to do is particularly expensive if you are doing it
fresh. We designed back stage, administrative offices and
public spaces to be accessible. Where we needed to move from
one level to another we put in a ramp or an
elevator."   
 Older theaters like the Count Basie Theatre on Monmouth
Street in Red Bank face more difficult challenges in
compliance but also have more leeway.   
 "Our theater was built in 1926," observed
marketing director Regina Paleau. "[Under the ADA] old
structures were grandfathered. However, once you do a
renovation, you are required to bring it into compliance.   
 "We're working to make the theater welcoming to
everyone, but money is still a problem" Paleau
admitted. "We're starting with the seats since that
would make the biggest difference for the audience."   
 Twenty new orchestra seats will be removable to allow
patrons in wheelchairs a wider choice of seating. Under the
old seating plan, wheelchair seating was concentrated in the
rear of the theater in front of the sound board.  
 "Before ADA, most functioning theaters wanted to be
accessible," according to Paleau, who has worked in a
variety of venues before coming to the Count Basie.
"Now having the law and having a basis for compliance
really moves that desire forward."   
 The Count Basie already has a handicapped-accessible
bathroom on the first floor and offers infra-red
assistive-listening devices and large-print programs. Paleau
is looking into the requirements for signers for theatrical
productions. The Basie's performance spaces, which are not
currently undergoing any renovation, still pose problems.
Veteran performer B.B. King had to use the loading-dock ramp
to gain access.  
 An accessible building isn't the entire picture, according
to Gsell, whose company also offers signed and open
captioned performances for the deaf and audio description
for the blind at its current home at the Algonquin Theatre
in Manasquan.  
 "A couple of years ago, even though we offered
performances, no one came," he admitted, "but we
made a commitment to build the audiences. We worked with
schools for the deaf, the Consumer Advisory Council on the
Disabled in Monmouth County and the Monthly Communicator [a
magazine for the deaf]. We asked, 'What performances would
your constituents be interested in attending?' and purposely
scheduled our signed performances on Saturday afternoons,
which was the time they felt was most convenient."  
 For Evelyn Gardell, artistic director of the Performing
Arts Ensemble (PAE) in Red Bank, working with people with
disabilities came quite naturally.   
 Gardell has included a man in a wheelchair in her
"Nutcracker" party scene by having her set
designer make the wheels look Victorian and has cast a young
man who was hearing impaired in the role of Fritz, Clara's
brother in "The Nutcracker."   
 His limited hearing was not a problem, she said.   
 "Fritz is an actor/dancer role with room for
interpretation," she explained. "If you are
dancing with another person, you pick up the choreography
and timing. He already understood the acting."  
 PAE incorporated spoken narration in its ballet
"Aladdin," and its production of "Alice in
Wonderland" has been presented with both spoken and
signed narration.   
 For Gardell those accommodations were artistic decisions
rather than a particular need to comply with the law because
both pieces are based on written works with strong stories.  
 PAE also offers sensory seminars where people with visual
impairments are invited to come on stage, see the dancers
and costumes up close, touch the props and have the story
explained prior to the performance.   
 Gardell is currently learning about dance for people in
wheelchairs and is planning on setting up a program for
schoolchildren with mobility disabilities.  
 Disability blind casting also comes naturally at the New
Jersey Repertory Theatre in Long Branch, according to Gabor
Barabas, artistic director.   
 "A couple of years ago we did a play called 'The Good
Daughter.' There is a role for a disabled young woman; we
cast the play with an actress [Christine Bruno] with
cerebral palsy."   
 Bruno didn't get the part because she was disabled but
"because she was a good actress," Barabas
explained.   
 A member of SAG/AFTRA/AEA, Bruno had worked with NJ Rep
previously on the Monday night script-reading series.  
 The Heart of New Jersey Chorus's commitment to inclusion
has had a profound effect on Kathy Ferreira of Holmdel, a
chorus member who has had cerebral palsy since birth and who
uses a walker and a wheelchair.   
 Ferreira, who met her husband at a chorus rehearsal and has
also performed in local productions of "Annie" and
"Peter Pan" with him and their two children,
explained, "CP hasn't affected my ability to sing, but
it does affect my ability to stand. I sit during rehearsals
and usually during performances, but sometimes the whole
chorus performs on stools.   
 "My balance wouldn't let me use a regular stool, so
the Sweet Adelines [the national parent group that sponsors
the Heart of New Jersey Chorus] did research and located a
special chair that can be attached to the risers."   
 For Ferreira, "the ADA is just the beginning. This is
the first time I've been part of a group who want me for me.
The last two places we sang, the building was accessible,
but the stage wasn't," she said. "My gang helped
me up the stairs. If I couldn't get to a stage, they would
perform on the floor with me."  
 Whether it's finding an architect to design an accessible
building or hiring performers with disabilities because of
their talents, local arts groups' response to the ADA is
best summed up by Two River Theatre's Guy Gsell.   
 "Without the ADA," he said, "we might never
have had the time to learn about a part of our community
that has become important to us.&




Monday, 9-August 2004 

http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=4291
Visual Arts Visual Arts Archives 
Subtle Artist Raced Through Her Short Life 
By robin laurence 
Publish Date: 12-Aug-2004 
 Susan Kealey: Ordinary Marvel 
At the Charles H. Scott Gallery until September 12 
Any analysis of Susan Kealey's career is inevitably
accompanied by a description of her health, and by arguments
both for and against folding the facts of illness and
disability into interpretations of her work. The
Toronto-based artist, who was born in 1959 and died in 2000,
was diagnosed with chronic leukemia at the age of 16. 

Nevertheless, she raced on with her life, acquiring two
university degrees, in philosophy and French translation,
before undertaking art studies. As a result of her early
leukemia treatments, however, Kealey suffered severe vision
loss in her 20s, and was legally blind when she enrolled at
the Ontario College of Art in 1985. Still, she graduated
from OCA with highest honours and became a vital member of
Toronto's visual-art community. 

 Kealey embraced multiple disciplines, including
photography, painting, installation, audio- and videotape,
and film projection, as well as writing, editing, and
curation. This exhibition, a small retrospective, covers
paintings and photographs produced between 1989 and 1999.
Created in series and often making wry minimal-conceptual
references through grids and monochromes, Kealey's paintings
are characterized by their textual components, while her
photographs focus on everyday, institutional, or unexpected
objects. Naming, classifying, and portraiture emerge as
significant preoccupations. 

Three of the earliest series on view, "Les Mots Pour le
Dire", "Patient Plaques", and "Institutional X-ray Specs",
combine medical and personal references and suggest that,
initially anyway, Kealey was interested in examining the
role illness and its treatment play in the shaping of
identity. Two later series of colour photographs, "Synopses"
and "Epilogue", place the odd medical reference--a toy
ambulance, a reflex hammer, a pill, a Ventolin
inhaler--within a wider survey of the banal and outrageous
particulars of daily life: a troll key chain, a Pez
dispenser, an elaborate dildo, a pack of playing cards. 

These works, which mimic advertising and commercial
photography in their isolation, enlargement, and luscious
fetishization of everyday objects, challenge our
relationship with both popular culture and the material
world, and deconstruct the ways in which consumer desire is
generated. At the same time, they suggest a kind of
cumulative self-portraiture. In "Synopses", for instance, an
image of a jelly doughnut, leaking its sticky red filling
onto a sterile white ground, reads as one of the most
painfully autobiographical references in the show. 

A late series of works, "People Who Need People", comprises
some 40 small, paintinglike squares, each consisting of an
embroidered name tag mounted on a piece of found fabric
mounted on a stretcher. The textiles range widely in colour,
texture, and pattern, and the name tags are subtly matched
to them, so that what emerges is a kind of fictional
portraiture, one that touches on ideas of individuality and
group alignment, on presence and absence, on self-assertion
and self-erasure. As with most of the art here, "People" is
subtle, funny, and poignant--and indicative of a sensibility
that was terminated far too soon.
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