Yesterday I visited the Walker to observe Sensory Friendly Sunday (SFS), which is a monthly event that happens for a few hours before the museum opens, designed to have dimmer lighting, quieter spaces, less visitors, and added accommodations like fidget toys, designated quiet spaces, and sound cancellation headphones and earplugs. The map of the activities is also labeled with which areas have higher lighting or sound. I was there for about an hour and a half, and I had no idea how much of the museum experience I had been missing out on all my life until attending SFS for the first time. I have really sensitive hearing and simultaneously not the best audio processing, so museums can be too echoey and distracting for me to focus on the art and read the didactics, even when there isn’t a large crowd. But on Sunday morning, the galleries were so quiet and peaceful. I was able to take as long as I needed to look at each artwork, and not worry so much about how people around me were moving.
When gallery spaces are designed and when an exhibition is being installed, it’s very important to consider how people will move through the space– but I think it’s often forgotten that other people determine a lot of how we move around the gallery space, more so than even the space itself. If there’s someone behind me while I’m looking at a piece I’m not likely to stay there as long as I would like, because they might think I’m taking too long, for example. SFS eliminated a lot of the stress of crowd movement and distracting noise and I looked much more deeply at the pieces on view because of the lack of distractions. Julie Mehretu doesn’t prime the edges of all of her paintings.
On my way out, I grabbed an art kit! It came with both white and colorful roving, a zip-lock bag, a sketchbook with prompts, a set of colored pencils, and instructions. The project is to make a felted abstract landscape based on the work of Ojibwe artist George Morrison (who also happens to be one of my favorite artists), using the roving, plastic bag, and a little soap and water– employing the use of a horizon line to create space in the finished piece. Naturally as I’ve always done, I strayed a bit from the assembly instructions since I happen to have some needle felting tools and a couple extra colors of roving. My landscape has grass toward the foreground, and a sky that is lavender at the horizon line and fades to a deep periwinkle toward the top of the image. There are a few purple clouds in the sky, and the sun is setting at the horizon line. It’s fascinating how kids and abstract artists often see the composition of landscape as something as simple as a horizon line and some depth of field, and those two elements alone can make up such a lovely landscape.