"When
we were discussing a painting by Chagall my husband said it brought back
memories of the cemetery where his mother was buried when he was a child of
eight. He had never mentioned that before." It was a mention about a caregiver's
experience who participated at Museum of Modern Art's Alzheimer program.
Dementia
is a general term for a group of brain disorders, of which Alzheimer's disease
is the most common. Alzheimer's disease destroys brain cells, memories,
language, and behaviors. According to MoMA's statics, “today more than five
million people in the United States are living with Alzheimer's disease. That
number has doubled since 1980 and is expected to be as high as sixteen million
by 2050.” [1]
Recently, museums that have accessibility programs for an audience with
dementia have increased. I believe this is due to the needs of lots of people
who have the disease. I want to introduce two art museum's accessibility
programs for an audience with dementia. One of them is the MoMA Alzheimer's
project: Meet Me and other program is Contemporary Journeys in Walker Art
Center.
MoMA's
Meet Me is a pioneer program in the museum field for people with dementia.
While watching around 6-7 art works together, they look at the works and talk about
their thoughts and observations with guiding questions of the educator. This
program developed with NYU is based on background information on dementia and
the research about how its programs affect people with Alzheimer's disease. The
program was developed by conducting evaluations with Audience Focus, Inc. in
2011. MoMA has led workshops for staff, educators, and other museums, and one
of the museums is Walker Art Center. The program is called Contemporary Journey
and has two parts: a gallery tour and an art lab class. In the gallery, the
audience observes and discusses the art works and in the art lab, they experience
various ways to see the world through art works. This program also was created
in collaboration with Alzheimer's Association of Minnesota-North Dakota, the Goodman
Group, and MoMA in New York.
These
programs do not rely on participants’ memories but their observations in the
moment. Thus, people with the disease don’t have to worry about their memory
loss. What’s more, most programs are designed as groups, so the audience can
communicate with each other and improve their social interactions. While
researching museum accessibility programs, I wondered why other museums didn’t
have similar programs except art museum. Even though art works have some concrete
information like historical facts and physical forms, there are no specific
answers to understand the works. They more touch on participants’ emotional
part. Thus, by describing their feelings, some people remember their childhood
like the mention of participant in first paragraph. Furthermore, through
collaborating with professional institute, the museums embrace their audience
in their program. If you want to see more details, you can find the resources
in below site:
·
MoMA
‘Meet Me’
·
Walker
Art Center ‘Contemporary Journey’
·
Journal
Article: Two Art Museum Programs for People with Dementia
[1] Publication of Meet Me:
Making Art Accessible for People with Dementia - http://www.moma.org/docs/meetme/Print_1_Dementia.pdf
I have very little experience with individuals with dementia, but think it is really interesting that they are becoming an audience museums are trying to program for. It does seem like we are ideal institutions for this as museums are full of objects that can trigger memories. I thought it was good that you brought up the idea that it seems like to be mainly art museums, it's something I have wondered about myself. I feel like history museums would work well too, especially if there were models or objects that these people could touch and hold to give them a tactile experience.
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