Public Talk & Masterclass with Georgina Kleege

In this lecture, Kleege explores the ways blindness and visual art are linked in many facets of the culture, speaking from her position as the blind daughter of two visual artists. Due to this background, she claims to know something about art, but recognizes that this claim challenges cultural notions that conflate seeing with knowing. She examines the ways blindness has been represented in philosophy, visual culture, and cognitive science, showing how these traditional understandings of blindness rely on an over-determined, one-to-one correspondence between touch in the blind and sight in the sighted, as if the other senses and other forms of cognition play no role in perception. Unfortunately, this reductive image of blindness often influences the design of museum access programs for the blind, including touch tours and verbal description of art. Kleege places these representations in conversation with autobiographical accounts by blind people, especially blind and visually impaired artists.