Accessible Public Art is Here!
STEPS Public Art Accessible Art & Placemaking Toolkit
PDF is available at this link
by Justine Bochenek, Research Coordinator | accessible art; placemaking; inclusive design; inclusive planning
Though it is a fundamental right for people from all communities to be able to use public space, it is widely accepted in North American culture that people with particular embodiments just won’t be able to access some spaces. For this reason, many D/deaf and disabled people opt out of participating in cultural activities altogether because, historically, there have been no opportunities for them to participate. For example, in art galleries, one goes to “look at art”. Blind, low-vision and visually impaired artists and audiences are often excluded from these cultural spaces due to the primacy of visual arts. Even if they are physically able to enter the cultural space, they do not have access to the art because they can’t engage with it on an emotional, intellectual or sensorial level. Accessibility to cultural spaces (and public spaces more broadly), therefore, needs to be considered holistically and meaningfully—this starts with a shift in imaginations about who might be an audience for art to include D/deaf and disabled people, but to look to the disability community as leaders and art producers.
STEPS Public Art has just recently released their free guidelines for planning and implementing public art initiatives and cultural programming that is accessible to all community members, The Accessible Art and Placemaking Toolkit. The toolkit is a comprehensive and progressive guide for community organizers and cultural planners to think critically about the types of public art and placemaking interventions that get displayed in the public realm, as well as rethinking what access means.
To prove that this is no ordinary access guide, the process to producing accessible public art begins with “Adopting a Proactive Attitude”. In this section of the toolkit, STEPS reminds the readers to remember that each person has unique access needs. This necessarily challenges the instinct for planners to reach for a checklist when implementing accessibility infrastructure. Checklists are fickle and unreliable because they operate on the assumption that disability is fixed, when in reality, a person’s accessibility needs can change at any time. In the section, “Why Accessible Art and Placemaking is Important” clearly explains the limitations of “accessibility checklists” when they write, “Accessibility is always a ‘moving target’; needs differ depending on each individual, can change throughout the span of a project, and can even contradict one another”. They suggest instead that flexibility and willingness to listen to the needs of the individuals of the communities you are working with, will have a greater impact and produce more inclusive outcomes. Overall, the toolkit uses a serious but friendly tone to describe the importance of the topic, how it has been overlooked in the past, and the benefits it can have for D/deaf and disabled artists and audiences.
Image description: Two people on a walk crossing an intersection, with a boom operator standing in front recording their conversation. One person is using a white cane and holding the arm of the other person, who is using a walker.
The toolkit also includes an outline of the development process, which includes two pilot accessible public art and placemaking projects installed in downtown Toronto. In partnership with the Business Improvement Areas in two Toronto neighbourhoods, STEPS developed two public art installations with focus on accessibility and disability. The first invited disabled artists and urban planners to participate in a walking tour with Blind Canadian playwright and artist, Alex Bulmer. The guests would take Alex for a walk and discuss the (in)accessibility features they saw along the way, as well as describe their personal experience in the particular public space as a person with a disability. The walks were recorded and edited into audio-narratives and are available to listen to on STEPS’s Youtube page. The second had artists with disabilities animating wheelchair wooden ramps for accessible entry into local storefronts as a reminder for the importance of accessibility in the community. Both projects were informed by and for D/deaf and disabled people, with the intention of shifting normalized ways of interacting with public space.
Image description: Two elaborately painted accessibility ramps. One is being shot from above at the finishing stages of the making, while the other is placed in front of a business, ready to be used.
This project is especially close to my heart because Sam and I had the pleasure of contributing some of our research findings discovered through initial analysis of the “Failing Better in Access” HAP Lab project, to the creation of this toolkit. Partly, we based our own research on the concept of “difference-centered design” which “centres D/deaf, mad and disability voices, culture and politics”. “Failing Better” and the Accessible Art and Placemaking Toolkit both maintain that a difference-centred approach to inclusion will benefit the most people, because D/deaf and disabled people know how to best be accommodated. It is up to cultural planners and community organizers to therefore make the most space for co-design and dialogue to be encouraged—and not to be dismissed as an added burden.
The Accessible Art and Placemaking Toolkit is therefore an essential resource to help create conditions that demonstrate to disabled people that their participation in cultural activities matters, by providing holistic and meaningful accessible infrastructures.
Great Resources that helped me write this post:
E. Sweeney. “Shifting definitions of Access: Disabiltiy and emancipatory curatorship in Canada.” 2010, Muse. https://www.elizabethsweeney.ca/writing#/new-page-1/
W. Mashburn & C. Papalia. “Meaningful Inclusion”. 2018, C Magazine, https://cmagazine.com/articles/meaningful-inclusion
R.E. Kadi. “Accessing the Arts: Towards Difference Centred Design”, 2021, Creative Users Projects.
