Museums tend to be verbal spaces: there’s usually a lot of words. Galleries open with walls of text, visitors are presented with rules of do and don'ts, and audio guides lead headphone-ed users from one piece to the next, paragraph by paragraph.
But Speechless: Different by Design, a new exhibit at the Dallas Art Museum and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, guides visitors as far away as possible from words with six custom art installations.
In this episode, curator Sarah Schleuning and graphic designer Laurie Haycock Makela discuss how their personal experiences lead them to Speechless, and describe the process and considerations of putting it all together.
Topics and Links
00:00 Intro
00:14 Museums as Verbal Spaces
00:52 Speechless: Different by Design (https://dma.org/speechless)
01:05 Sarah Schleuning
01:30 Schleuning’s Personal Experience
02:45 Picture Exchange System
03:40 Planning Speechless
05:00 Yuri Suzuki’s ‘Sound of the Earth Chapter 2’ (https://earthsounds.dma.org/)
05:17 Misha Kahn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misha_Kahn)
05:38 Laurie Haycock Makela
06:08 Makela’s Personal Experience
06:55 The Exhibition's Ground Rules
07:11 The Exhibition's Design
09:26 Museum Fatigue (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/2)
11:30 What Keeps Schleuning Up at Night
12:16 Museum Selfies (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/9)
13:29 Introducing Archipelago at the Movies ?️! (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago/posts?tag=Archipelago%20at%20The%20Movies)
14:16 Outro | Join Club Archipelago (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago)
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Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 72. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.


View Transcript



Museums tend to be verbal spaces: there’s usually a lot of words. Galleries open with walls of text, visitors are presented with rules of do and don'ts, and artists guide headphone-ed users from one piece to the next paragraph by paragraph.

But there’s a new series ot exhibits designed to be different, to guide visitors as far away as possible from words.

One of those is a collaboration of the Dallas Art Museum and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. It’s called Speechless, and to underline the point, it is subtitled: different by design.


Sarah Schleuning: Speechless has been an exhibition that merges research and aesthetics and innovative new design to explore accessibility and modes of communication in the museum setting.


This is Sarah Schleuning, curator of Speechless.


Sarah Schleuning: Hello, my name is Sarah Schleuning and I am The Margot B. Perot Senior Curator of Decorative Arts and Design and the interim Chief curator at the Dallas Museum of Art. A