S3 Ep020 Communication Accessibility, Museum Exhibition Design and Christine Sun Kim, with Curator Rachel Seligman, Pt1
Rachel Seligman, the Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and the Malloy Curator at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, will discuss her work to improve communication accessibility in exhibition design and the museum space, and her curatorial work with Berlin-based contemporary artist Christine Sun Kim. She shares:
The mission of the Tang Museum to reflect the richness and diversity of the human experience;
The details about American Sign Language that hearing-typical people often get wrong;
Conceptual frameworks and themes in Christine Sun Kim’s work that reveal the relationship of sound to structures and systems of power in the world;
Christine Sun Kim’s strategic tool to work across difference;
Where our society regularly misdirects the work of improving accessibility.
Bio:
Rachel Seligman is the Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. She has a BA from Skidmore College and an MA in Art History from George Washington University. She has taught Art History at SUNY Adirondack in Glens Falls, NY, Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY, and the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, and currently teaches a class called “Math in the Museum” at Skidmore College.
Her curatorial practice includes many interdisciplinary collaborative projects with faculty colleagues, on subjects including social class; activism, civil rights, and social justice; pattern in art and science; democracy and citizenship; and Solomon Northup, among others; as well as curating solo exhibitions of artists including Tim Davis, Lauren Kelley, Yvette Janine Jackson, and Christine Sun Kim, among others. Seligman is the co-author of Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave (Praeger, 2013), as well as author of numerous exhibition catalogues including Classless Society (Tang, 2014), Machine Project (DelMonico-Prestel, 2016), Sixfold Symmetry (Tang, 2018), Tim Davis – When We Are Dancing (I Get Ideas) (Tang, 2020), Like Sugar (Tang, 2020), FLEX (Tang, 2023), and the forthcoming Christine Sun Kim: Oh Me Oh My (Delmonico-D.A.P., 2024).
“ Central, I think, to Christine's work is engaging with sound and engaging with how sound is understood, how it's experienced, how it's valued, how it functions within the world as a point of inequality between the disability community, the Deaf community, and the larger world. How the structures and systems that we operate in, by and large, privilege sound and the hearing world over those who are members of the Deaf community.”
-Rachel Seligman
Transcript
Season 3, Episode 20 (Part 1) : Communication Accessibility, Museum Exhibition Design and Christine Sun Kim, with Curator Rachel Seligman
Rachel Seligman:
Central, I think, to Christine's work is engaging with sound and engaging with how sound is understood, how it's experienced, how it's valued, how it functions within the world as a point of inequality between the disability community, the Deaf community, and the larger world. How the structures and systems that we operate in, by and large, privilege sound and the hearing world over those who are members of the Deaf community.
[Rhythmic sounds of electric train pulling into station]
[Subway chimes arpeggio played on mandolin]
Cevan Castle, Host:
Welcome to Towards a Kinder Public, a podcast dedicated to designing kinder public space that better meets our interconnected needs. I’m Cevan Castle, and along with Annie Chen, we are Kinderpublic.
We are so fortunate to be able to share this conversation with Rachel Seligman, the Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and the Malloy Curator at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Rachel recently curated an exhibition of the Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim, with works in sound, drawing, mural and video. Christine Sun Kim explores themes of notation, transcription and conversion, scale, humor, vibration, body, volume, and language, including American Sign Language, or ASL. The exhibition at the Tang Museum was accompanied by months of programming, including free ASL workshops for the community, ASL-only curatorial tours, and Deaf community gatherings.
Rachel will share with us how she became familiar with the work, the language and disability frameworks that Christine Sun Kim prefers to use, and how hearing people push the work of building bridges onto the disability community that they claim to include.
To share the disability frameworks that I carry into this conversation, I want to consider the idea of Deaf Gain. I believe that deafness should be understood as a whole and complete state of being, which hearing people have little incentive to consider. The hearing-typical world generally frames deafness as loss, and incorrectly identifies American Sign Language as a kind of visual English. When we fail to correct this misconception, more broadly, we fail to implement true communication access for all in public space, and we prevent hearing people from experiencing beneficial languages and perspectives. And that is our loss.
This interview is filled with information about how the Tang Museum worked to become a more inclusive space. I hope you find it informative, and join us again for Part 2 next week, where we will dive into some specific modifications of operations and exhibition space, and hear a perspective-shifting story about inclusivity in public space. Thank you so much for listening!
[Subway chimes arpeggio played on mandolin]
Cevan, Opening Interview:
I've enjoyed talking to you so much, we've had a few conversations leading up to this one. Welcome, and can you share a little bit about the museum, its location and the work it focuses on?
Rachel Seligman:
Thank you so much, Cevan. It's really an honor to be talking to you. I'm so pleased.
And yes, let me start just by saying a little bit about the museum. It is located on the Skidmore College campus in Saratoga Springs, New York, and the museum opened in the year 2000, so we're 23. And we're an academic museum, which means that we have a mission to engage and to be a space of teaching and learning for our campus community. And what makes, I think, the Tang a little bit distinctive, is that, what this means for us, is that we are a space for teaching and learning across all the areas of study and all the academic disciplines on our campus. So that's a kind of core mission for the museum, to be a space of active and engaged learning, and to be a space for interdisciplinary learning where people can come and use visual art to connect their ideas and understandings and learnings about what it means to be alive in the world today.
We also obviously are very dedicated to welcoming and engaging the community, the broader community, with the richness and the diversity of the human experience. And we do that, again, through the exhibitions that we make and the programs that we present.
So, I'd love to say just a little bit more generally about the museum. We present rotating exhibitions throughout the year, so all our exhibition spaces, all our gallery spaces, are devoted to rotating exhibitions. We don't have galleries that are sort of permanently installed with the collection, and we focus on making interdisciplinary exhibitions that are co-curated with faculty.
We also make one person exhibitions of artists that we consider to be sort of under-recognized within the modern temporary art canon. And so we're looking to reinsert them into the discourse. And we also do one person exhibitions of mid-career artists for whom this might be their first solo exhibition in a museum.
And we also do a lot of exhibition making, that is course-based, so working with students in classes, all of our curatorial program is really developed with an eye towards connecting with the issues and scholarship and questions that are being grappled with by our on-campus community, or the community at large, around the country, around the world. So we want to be a place where people can ask hard questions, you know, tackle / grapple with difficult issues, and think deeply about the human experience.
Cevan:
I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. I love the idea also that you're presenting a place where people can grapple with some issues that are difficult and challenging and this is the place that you'll be supported and safe to do so.
Rachel Seligman:
Exactly. Yeah.
Cevan:
You have curated a wonderful exhibition of the artist Christine Sun Kim's work. Can I ask what drew you to this work, and when did you first start thinking about her work in a curatorial sense? And can you talk about the show and the works you have put together for the exhibition at the Tang Museum?
Rachel Seligman:
Yes. I first encountered Christine's work in 2013, so about 10 years ago. And I was introduced to it by a student of ours who was interning in the Curatorial Department here at the Tang. And this student was a member of the Deaf community and she told me I should show Christine's work, and I'm forever grateful to her for that because I was drawn to it immediately.
I was drawn to it because it approached sound-based art from a direction that I had not really seen before, and which I found really compelling and moving. At that time, Christine was creating visualizations of sound using speakers and subwoofers to move pigment around on paper. So she was basically creating drawings made by sound waves. I immediately began thinking about her work in terms of being a curator who wanted to show her work at the Tang and wanted to introduce that work to our communities here at Skidmore and in Saratoga.
And my first impulse actually was, and what I invited her to do at that time, was to work on something for our elevator where we have a series called Elevator Music, which is all sound-based art. So Christine and I communicated about that idea in 2013, 2014, but she had just moved to Berlin and she wasn't really in a position to create a site specific work back in the US at that time. But I've been following her work ever since as it has evolved, and it's evolved quite a bit over the last decade, and I've been sort of waiting for the right moment to show her work ever since.
So I would say that this show took shape in 2020, is when it sort of began, and it's a curatorial collaboration between several venues. So I do want to give credit where credit is due, to everyone who was involved in making a solo show of Christine's work possible: the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver; Remai Modern, which is a great museum in Saskatchewan in Saskatoon; and the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College in Ohio; and the Tang at Skidmore. We all collaborated together to put this show together. It's about 40 artworks and most of them are borrowed from lenders, from collectors. So it's a big project to do that, to pull all of that together. The show is drawings, videos, murals, and sound work, and it's from about the last 10 years. So it's a kind of mid-career survey.
I would say the largest number, the medium that has the largest number of works in the show, is drawings. Drawing is a very big part of Christine's practice. A lot of these drawings are fairly large scale, they're like 50 to 60 inches square. So they're very sort of human scale, and they're almost all charcoal on paper. So black and white is the kind of dominant color scheme of the show. There are also two murals in the show, one of which is a brand new, site-specific piece that incorporates a big painting on the wall, but also framed drawings that hang on top of that mural. So there's, I think, a general sense in the show of a kind of large scale, which we could talk about at some point, sort of the conceptual underpinnings of Christine's use of scale.
Cevan:
That's a great overview of how the works look and the scale and what the experience is in the space. We will touch on many of these concepts in more depth later in our discussion, but for the purposes of establishing our language and frameworks, can you explain the words that Christine Sun Kim prefers and uses to talk about herself, her linguistic community, and her art practice? I just want to get the language established for our conversation.
Rachel Seligman:
Okay. I'll start by saying that although American Sign Language and the oppression faced by the Deaf community are often fundamental parts of her work, centering Christine's deafness in the lowercase sense of the word, especially when talking about her artwork, can be quite reductive and othering. And it's something that as a curator of her work, I try to be really mindful of.
To answer your question, Christine considers herself a member of the Deaf community and she's explicit about that being Deaf with a capital D, there’s a really important distinction between capital and lowercase D when you're using the word deaf, because deaf with a lowercase D means a medical condition, but Deaf with a capital D means a whole community, a culture which is a really rich culture of shared languages, shared history of social beliefs and values, it has a vibrant literary tradition. So, it operates very similarly to any other culture.
And Christine is very explicit about being a member of the Deaf community and of sharing in that Deaf culture. Christine's first language or natural language is ASL, American Sign Language.
She doesn't read lips, she doesn't take speech therapy.
And I think it's important to say a little bit about ASL because it's misunderstood often in the hearing world. ASL is a really complex, nuanced visual language. It incorporates facial expression, hand shapes, and hand and body movement. So people often think of ASL and refer to it as gestures, as a language of gestures, and that's really inaccurate and really reductive. So like to give you an example or a sense of the importance of facial expression, Christine says that ASL is 80% facial expression and 20% handshape. So it's a language that incorporates all of this very bodily, very corporeal language.
And it's also one of hundreds of different sign languages used all around the world. So it's not the only sign language. Each one has its own distinctive vocabulary. Of course, ASL is not related to spoken English, its origins are actually closer to French Sign Language because of how it developed and evolved. Someone who's signing in French Sign Language would have an easier time being understood by someone who's signing in ASL than, say, between an ASL speaker and a British Sign Language speaker. Those languages, even though in spoken language, they're very… almost the same, in sign language, they're nothing like each other. So the origins of these languages and how they evolve and how they exist is completely independent of spoken language.
And ASL has an entirely different grammar and entirely different syntax than spoken English. And of course, people who use ASL, who speak ASL, often rely on an interpreter when they're communicating with someone who uses spoken language. And it's important to know that in most cases that the person who's doing that work is called an interpreter and not a translator. So I mean, I could say a lot more about ASL if you would like, but I'm also happy to say a little bit more about languages and frameworks.
Cevan:
I think it was really helpful, and I think that I would just like to go back and touch on something which you did mention, which is that deaf with a small D is referring to a medical condition and Deaf with a capital D is referring to a linguistic community. Is that correct?
Rachel Seligman:
Yes, I would say that's correct. But I would say that Deaf with a capital D is referring to a community that certainly is anchored linguistically, but that incorporates members who may also speak spoken languages, may have partial deafness as opposed to being entirely deaf. And so the Capital D Deaf community or Deaf culture is again, like any other culture, extremely varied. It is not a monolith, there's not a sort of one size fits all. There's many different ways to be a member of the Deaf community, and there are many different kinds of ways of understanding yourself to be a member of the Deaf community. So it could be that you are deaf with a lowercase d, but don't really understand yourself to be part of the Deaf community.
And certainly there are hearing individuals who are part of Deaf community in various ways, and that I think is most clearly understood- because that might seem a little counterintuitive- but I think if you think about family members, that's a really good way to think about it. So you might be a CODA, a child of a deaf adult, and you might understand yourself to be part of the Deaf community because of that family connection and having grown up with deaf parents, for example.
Cevan:
Having explained that, can you touch on the works and the concepts that she deals with in her artwork, and that are presented in your show?
Rachel Seligman:
Central, I think, to Christine's work is engaging with sound. And engaging with how sound is understood, how it's experienced, how it's valued, how it functions within the world as a point of inequality between the disability community, the deaf community, and the larger world, how the structures and systems that we operate in, by and large, privilege sound and the hearing world over those who are members of the Deaf community.
I would say that Christine's work is really about experiencing sound not orally, that is in the sense of hearing it through your ears, but rather thinking about the visual manifestations of sound, the physical experience of sound, and the political dimensions that sound inhabits. And for those of us who are hearing, it's really I think important for us to begin to see the ways in which sound operates for those who are members of the Deaf community.
It's not accurate to say that members of the Deaf community have no experience of sound. In fact, members of the Deaf community have an incredibly intimate and intense understanding of sound. It's just different from the one that we have as hearing individuals. And it's really important for us, I think, to begin to understand sound in these other dimensions, because it helps us to understand the lived experience of other people in our communities.
I would say that for over the last 10 years, you know, I was talking about, the show really is kind of a survey of the last 10 years or so. And over that time, Christine has really refined a very singular, kind of dryly humorous approach to making work, and a formal vocabulary that's quite distinctive and recognizable. She uses elements from a lot of existing visual languages that we as people who can hear are familiar with, like infographics or musical notation, memes, or written English.
So things that we're very familiar with, and she combines them and employs them in different moments, in different works, both to create a kind of clarity of communication across this difference of language, but also to kind of harness the power of those existing languages and what they mean to the hearing world, as a kind of conceptual strategy for communicating about how she is experiencing the structures and systems of this world.
One of the major visual vocabularies that you see a lot in her work that's in this show is her use of musical notation, by which I mean musical notes, staff lines and things like dynamic markings, like forte markings and piano markings, and also the kind of arced line that indicates a legato, a certain style of playing, a smooth connecting of musical notes.
And so she is, with those musical notations, she's really asking us to think about the power and the history of music in our cultures. And she's kind of harnessing that power in order to speak about the relationship of Deaf community to power and social structures.
Cevan:
And there's one other theme that jumped out to me in the show, which was her humorous handling of the lack of understanding between hearing people and deaf people, and the way that hearing people are not aware of their counterparts as deaf people must be of their hearing counterparts.
Rachel Seligman:
That's right. I mean, because hearing people are the dominant culture, we’re not obligated to really pay any attention. But if you're a member of the Deaf community, you have to navigate within this system that isn't constructed with you in mind. And so you're always reminded of, and you're always having to negotiate your basic existence within that world, which is exhausting. And some of her work is about that too, it’s about the toll that all of that additional effort and labor takes on the physical and psychological health of the individual.
But yes, humor is a strategy that she has employed and which I think is extremely effective. She has said that she isn't a naturally funny person. This is something that she cultivated over time as a tool, as a strategy, for engaging with people across difference, and when engaging with people over very challenging content. And that humor is a bridge that connects us and reminds us of our shared humanity, and is therefore one of a number of kind of strategies that she uses in order to get people's attention, and connect them, and sort of disarm or drop their defenses, so that there's space there for people to actually come to these ideas in an open way, and potentially recognize themselves or their part in these systems and oppressions that are sort of part of the daily life of members of the Deaf community.
Christine is very clear that she's not speaking for the Deaf community at large, she's speaking only for herself. And her work very much comes from a place of her individual experience. So she's telling stories about her individual experience, but in a way that allows us to see the larger, more universal messages behind them, and to think about how we might be complicit in some of those structures that are in place, that cause her to have those individual experiences that she has.
Cevan:
This is a theme that comes up, I think, for us over and over, where the weight of building the bridge is placed on the person with the disability rather than the people who have…
Rachel Seligman:
The people with privilege, right?
Cevan:
Right.
Rachel Seligman:
The people with the privilege and the power.
Cevan:
Yes. Mm-hmm.
Rachel Seligman:
But you're right, that's an incredible imbalance. The people with the privilege and the power are not, generally do not take responsibility, for building those bridges, and it falls to the community that is struggling.
Cevan:
Mmm-hmm. It's so important to recognize that. And thank you so much for sharing these stories, because we are not doing the work that we should be, to help improve our communities and make them more inclusive spaces.
[Audio recording of “Tuning Forks on Resonators” demonstration of the interaction of sound waves with physical objects (from the Physical Science Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History) begins to play in background]
Cevan:
Join us again for Part 2 next week, and be sure to check out our website kinderpublic.com for more information about our guest and the topic, as well as a full transcript of the conversation which can be found on the podcast page. A captioned episode is available on our Youtube channel, where we are @kinderpublic.
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I’m Cevan Castle, my guest has been Rachel Seligman, the Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and the Malloy Curator at the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York. Have a very good week!
[“Tuning Forks on Resonators” fades out]
“Tuning Forks on Resonators“ demonstration video of the interaction of sound waves with physical objects, care of the Physical Science Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_ZBELcyb3g