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Haptic Encounter by Georgina Kleege with work by Michael Arcega

In Conjunction with the exhibition Jewish Folktales Retold: Artist as Maggid, on view Sep 28, 2017–Jan 28, 2018 at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco.

Haptic Encounters is a collaborative project with writer and professor Georgina Kleege that investigates how tactile and kinesthetic explorations of works of art can engage all visitors with the possibilities for appreciating art through a non-visual sense. With a practice that is informed by her interest in blindness and visual art, Kleege invites us to reimagine “qualities such as texture, temperature, weight, resilience, and density that may not be apparent to the eyes alone.”

Six audio recordings of these Haptic Encounters were available in the gallery during the exhibition at select listening stations. 

About Georgina Kleege
Georgina Kleege

Georgina Kleege, professor in the English and Disability Studies departments at UC Berkeley has been a leading scholar on the intersections between blindness, visual art and has expanded the field of audio description through her practice. She has lectured and served as consultant to art institutions around the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London.  Kleege’s latest book, More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art, (forthcoming in 2017) is concerned with blindness and visual art: how blindness is represented in art, how blindness affects the lives of visual artists, how museums can make visual art accessible to people who are blind and visually impaired.

Image description: Close up of Georgina Kleege smiling widely to the camera, pictured from the shoulders up. The top of her white cane appears in the image, appearing that she is holding it with her left hand. Georgina has short white hair that reaches just beneath her ears, and she is wearing a moss-green linen cardigan and a black shirt. In the background is a section of the introductory wall graphic for the exhibition, which is a mint green color.

supporters

Leadership Support for digital media at The Contemporary Jewish Museum is generously provided by the Jim Joseph Foundation.

Jewish Folktales Retold: Artist as Maggid is organized by The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. Lead sponsorship is provided by the Koret Foundation. Major support is provided by Gaia Fund, Wendy Kesser, and Dorothy R. Saxe. Sponsorship is provided in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Contemporary Jewish Museum thanks The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for its major support of The Museum’s exhibition program.

Access Programs are made possible by major support from Wells Fargo Foundation. Additional generous support is provided by Toole Family Charitable Foundation and The Morse Family Foundation.

Image Credit

Video by Laurie Lezin-Schmidt. Photos by Gary Sexton Photography.