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The Museum connects visitors with disabilities to the world of art through a wide variety of unique Accessible Programs.
There is a designated barrier-free entrance located at the West entrance of the Museum. Accessible parking for vehicles displaying the appropriate disability permits is located on the Terrace level. This parking is available on a first-come, first-served basis. There are also accessible parking spaces available in the Museum’s parking garage.
Wheelchairs are available free of charge, on a first-come, first-served basis, inside all entrances. All floors are accessible by elevator. The Museum is also equipped with accessible restrooms, drinking fountains and public telephones.
The Restaurant, Café, and Museum Store are barrier-free.
Assistive listening devices, including neck loops, are available for guided tours (ask your Tour Guide) and for programs in the Van Pelt Auditorium (ask at the Information Desk). Braille and large-print maps of the Museum are also available at Information Desks.
For information about other Braille and large-print materials, visual description (on guided tours for visitors who are blind or visually impaired), and Sign Language Interpreters, print scripts and open captioning (for visitors who are deaf or hard of hearing), or to arrange for Braille or large print materials to be created, please contact the Accessible Programs Office. Allow three weeks for arrangements to be completed.
2012 Commitment to Cultural Access Award
Local cultural service organization Art-Reach gives the Philadelphia Museum of Art it’s 2012 Commitment to Cultural Access Award “for its dedication to keeping art accessible in our region through programs such as “Form in Art”, offered to people who are blind, and by ensuring that public school children visit the collections, participate in art making activities, and learn about our region’s rich cultural heritage.”
Admission and Registration
- All programs require registration. To reserve your space email .
- General admission fees for individuals and groups of people with disabilities who schedule through the office of Accessible Programs are $8 per person.
- Personal Attendants of individuals with disabilities are admitted free of charge. Limit of one attendant per individual.
Accessible Tours
As part of the Museum's mission to make the visual arts accessible to everyone, a variety of tours are offered to help visitors with disabilities get the most from their visit. Led by specially trained, experienced Museum Guides, these tours include:
Specially Tailored Tours
These tours are available by prearrangement for individuals or groups with mobility, hearing, visual, cognitive, and communication impairments, or other unique perspectives. Themed tours are developed around the needs and interests of the participants and can focus on any aspect of the Museum’s collections and exhibitions. Touchable and visual materials supplement descriptions and discussions.
Sign Language Interpreted Tours
Collections and exhibitions are available by prearrangement for individuals or groups who are deaf. FM assistive listening devices, with headphones or neck loops, are available for use on any tour, just ask your Tour Guide. Printed scripts of all audio tours are available at any Visitor Services desk.
Touch Tours
Selected original works of art in the Museum's collections are available for visitors who are blind or visually impaired to experience through touch. The Museum Guide's visual descriptions are supplemented by the visitor’s guided touching of these objects. A maximum of two to three visitors with each Museum Guide facilitates optimal enjoyment of these tours. Several Guides may conduct each tour. Touch Tour topics include>>
- Modern and Contemporary Art: focusing on the human figure, this tour includes styles from the very realistic to the very abstract. One of the objects is the 13-foot stainless steel sculpture Two Box Structure (1961) by David Smith.
- Nineteenth-Century European Art: includes the life-size bronze sculpture The Large Bather and the 2-foot-tall bronze bas-relief Tambourine Dancer I, both by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
- European Decorative Arts and Sculpture: includes a Medieval cloister with a marble fountain, columns and capitals, as well as the 3-foot-tall sculpture Virgin and Child (c. 1350).
- East Asian Art: includes an 18-inch stone head from Cambodia, a wood and iron object from Korea, and the complete Japanese Teahouse Sunkaraku (c. 1917) from Tokyo.
- Indian and Himalayan Art: includes an Indian Temple Hall (c. 1525–50), from Madurai, India, with intricately carved figures covering its 26 granite columns, and a 4-foot-tall depiction of Durga as the Slayer of the Demon Nishumbha (c. 950) as well as Seated Lion (c. 650) from southern India.
- The Rodin Museum: Located at the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 22nd Street, this tour includes numerous sculptures by French artist Auguste Rodin, including his 20 x 13 feet Gates of Hell, the life-size Colossal Head of Balzac, The Burghers of Calais, and The Hand of God.
Touchable Interpretations of Paintings
These three-dimensional representations of selected paintings in the Museum’s permanent collections allow blind, visually impaired, and sighted visitors alike to experience masterpieces from the collections that cannot be touched. Each interpretation consists of three parts>>
- A visual description that gives an objective overview of and then "builds" the painting, step by step
- A series of black-and-white, raised-line, textured diagrams that illustrate each step in building the paining
- A 2 to 6-inch-thick sculptural representation of the painting that is colored and textured to resemble the original subjects in the painting
Paintings include: Still Life with Apples and a Glass of Wine by Paul Cézanne, Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks, Portrait of Camille Roulin by Vincent van Gogh, and Saint Francis of Assissi Receiving the Stigmata by Jan van Eyck.
Hands-On Object Kits
Visitors and groups who learn best by manipulating materials may make arrangements to examine reproductions of objects with a Museum guide before their gallery tour. Hands-On Object Kits relate to tour themes, including Asian Art, Medieval Art, Nineteenth-Century European Art, and Twentieth-Century Art.
Form in Art
Form in Art combines art-making studio classes and the study of art history into a unique course for legally blind adults. About 20 percent of people who are legally blind can see nothing at all. The rest have some residual vision, which varies greatly from person to person. More people are visually impaired than are blind.
Visual description and touch tours by specially trained guides help these students get an initial, objective experience of select objects in the Museum's galleries. Then, historical and subjective information and lectures by conservators and curators fill in this overview and teach them about the role of the art museum. In the studio classes, artist instructors expose the students to a wide variety of materials and techniques to assist and encourage their self-expression. Volunteers help students with their art making processes. At the end of each year, 100 of their best works are exhibited in the Museum’s Education Corridor, which not only gives students a public voice and serves as a celebration of their efforts, but is also an inspiration to blind and sighted Museum visitors alike.
Four different Form in Art classes meet once a week for two 13-week semesters each year. There are about twelve students in each class.
Students come from a wide variety of backgrounds and are not required to have had previous art training before entering this Form in Art program. There is a $10 (beginners) or $40 (advanced) registration fee for each semester. The Museum provides all supplies and also arranges and pays half of the students' transportation to and from the classes.
Fall semester: Friday, September 14 – Friday, December 14, 2012
Spring semester: Friday, February 15 – Friday, May 17, 2013
Workshops
Several times a year, workshops are offered to individuals or groups of people with cognitive and communication impairments. Each workshop includes a one-hour tour in the Museum's galleries and a two-hour studio class. Experience is not required.
Recent projects have included multicolor block prints (using ball point pens to "carve into" balsa wood blocks), self-portraits in acrylic paint on 10 x 14–inch canvas board, and chairs designed and constructed from two pieces of 8 x 10–inch card stock. Each project is designed to be successful for the wide range of the participants' abilities. Everyone can take their artwork home with them when they leave. Participants’ artwork is periodically exhibited in the Museum’s Education Corridor.
Schedule
Classes start at 10:30 am in the Education Studios, and end at 1:30 pm. If you wish, there can be a half-hour break for lunch. Food is available in the Museum Café, or may be brought.
Cost:
$10.00 per person
Personal Attendants are admitted free
Art Talk
Individuals who can no longer visit the Museum due to age-related limitations or disabilities can still experience the excitement of a lively conversation about works of art. Art Talk links ten to fifteen participants in their homes with a Museum or Park House Guide on a FREE conference call through a regular phone line, providing an ideal way for art lovers to connect. You can participate in the conversation or just listen, and you do not need an art background to enjoy Art Talk. A booklet will be sent to you to view objects as you listen and discuss them.
Each session is approximately 45 minutes to one hour in length, with two or three sessions per course. Past courses have included paintings and sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Peter Paul Rubens, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Claude Monet, and Auguste Rodin, as well as decorative arts and architecture from the historic houses of Fairmount Park. You are invited to join one of the upcoming courses and spend an hour in each of three weeks in conversation with new friends
Schedule
Courses are scheduled monthly and held on three consecutive Wednesdays from 1:00–2:00 p.m. on your home phone. See the Museum calendar for details.
Outreach
Groups who can no longer come to the Museum due to age-related limitations or disabilities can still maintain their connection to the art world. With digitally illustrated lectures led by trained Museum Guides, they may experience the excitement of special exhibitions or selected works from the Museum's permanent collections in the comfort and familiarity of their own facility.
In addition to the digitally illustrated presentation, some guides will include a few touchable, supplemental materials to illustrate the talk, which focuses on the exhibition, the history of selected objects, and the background of the artists. Lectures last approximately one hour. Please make reservations early (at least three weeks in advance).
The Museum Guide will bring a laptop computer with the selected presentation. All organizations must provide their own digital projector and must have someone who is knowledgeable about the equipment on hand to assist with the needs of the residents and the speaker. If you do not have a projector, please contact the office of Accessible Programs to make alternative arrangements. All organizations should provide a white screen or wall in a darkened room. A Microphone is also recommended.
Cost: $125
Location: Your facility
Highlights of the Collection
Available Year-Round
The Museum's vast collection of fine and applied arts from Asia, Europe, and the United States is highlighted through this digitally illustrated lecture program. Spanning over 2,000 years, the collections include masterpieces of painting, sculpture, prints, and drawings displayed with a wide range of furniture, silver, glasswork, architectural elements, and entire furnished period rooms from historic houses.
20th Century Painting and Sculpture
Available Year-Round
The Museum’s superb collection of modern and contemporary art is among the most distinguished in the world. Highlights include an extraordinary concentration of work by artistic giants such as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Henri Matisse, as well as American Modernists like Georgia O’Keeffe. The expanding contemporary collections include major works by Jasper Johns and Sol LeWitt, along with younger artists who are breaking new ground today.
The American Collection
Available Year-Round
The history of the United States is brought to life through the Museum’s American collections, which survey three centuries of paintings, furniture, sculpture, and decorative arts with a special emphasis on Philadelphia’s rich traditions. The collections include important portraits, landscapes, and figure paintings by eighteenth and nineteenth-century masters, including the country’s finest group of work by Philadelphia’s Thomas Eakins.
An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing The Gross Clinic Anew
Available Year-Round
Acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2007 after a stirring public campaign to keep the painting in Philadelphia, Thomas Eakins’ masterpiece, Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic) of 1875, has been cleaned and restored for the first time in almost fifty years. The painting emerges from the conservation studio as the centerpiece of this exhibition, which throws new light on a work acclaimed as the greatest American painting of the nineteenth century.
Inviting visitors to see this celebrated painting afresh, the exhibition first evokes the experience of The Gross Clinic in Eakins’s own day. Aiming to make an international impression at the Centennial Exhibition, which took place in Philadelphia in 1876, the young and ambitious Eakins (1844–1916) prepared a monumental modern history painting celebrating the nation’s most famous surgeon, Dr. Samuel Gross of Jefferson Medical College (now part of Thomas Jefferson University). Rejected by the jury as too gruesome for the art galleries, however, the picture was installed among the medical displays of the U. S. Army model post hospital.
Eakins’s preparatory studies for the painting, X-radiographs of the canvas, historical images of The Gross Clinic, and a video documentary help visitors understand how the painting was made, how it looked in 1875, and how and why it has changed over time.
"Great and Mighty Things": Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection
Available through June 9, 2013
The power of self-taught artistic talent, the drive of the human spirit to create, and the wonders of highly original inner worlds revealed. These are just a few of the reasons why the Philadelphia Museum of Art is proud to debut the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, a promised gift to the Museum of more than two hundred works by self-taught artists.
Discover the visual strength and original beauty of these works by twenty-seven untrained American artists, each with a moving personal story, many from disadvantaged, rural backgrounds far removed from the mainstream art world. This exhibition surprises and challenges museum goers, forces examination of the conventional definition of the word "artist," and shows that good art is good art regardless of the maker's résumé. Visitors will see unforgettable works, dating from the 1930s to 2010, by passionate artists who made objects of seductive richness that can stand alongside the best of modern and contemporary art.
What is Outsider Art?
What is "outsider" art that it should be given this confusing designation (outside of what?), be treated as a separate entity from mainstream art, and often be shown only in specialized museums and sold by particular galleries? The basic answer is that it is art made by people who have not gone to art school, who usually do not operate professionally or earn their livings as artists, and who create, for the most part, with limited or no connection to the art world and its dealers, galleries, collectors, critics, schools, and museums. Not categorized by styles, movements, or trends, it is art made by individuals who are driven to create by their own particular inner compulsions, which may be visionary, derived from memories, evangelical, or popular-culture inspired. It is almost always strongly influenced by local or regional cultures and often is made from found, homemade, or unusual materials.
The best outsiders produce work that is out of the ordinary, edgy, imaginative, or even obsessive-compulsive. Their creations are frequently raw or crude in execution but masterful in color choices and composition. Many of these self-taught artists create large-scale "environments," some of which derive from the southern African American yard-art tradition.
Recognized as a specific field from the early twentieth century in Europe—at that time associated with the art of the mentally ill—and in America since the 1930s and 1940s, outsider art is now a global phenomenon, albeit a minor one within the full spectrum of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. It occupies a position parallel to but not identical with mainstream modern and contemporary art.
Fairmount Park Houses
Available Year-Round
This digitally illustrated lecture on the historic Fairmount Park Houses offers unique glimpses into early Philadelphia. Through these brilliantly preserved mansions, observe architectural and decorative styles of the day and learn more about the lives of prominent Philadelphians in colonial times. The lecture includes Mount Pleasant, Cedar Grove, Woodford Mansion, Lemon Hill, Sweetbriar, Strawberry Mansion, and Laurel Hill.
The Perelman Building
Available Year-Round
With its gleaming rows of windows, bright interior, and twin cathedral-like entrances, the landmark Art Deco building on Fairmount and Pennsylvania avenues was called "the Gateway to Fairmount Park" when it opened in 1927 as the headquarters for the Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company. It has now been dramatically recast in a new role as the gateway to the future for the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Set within a lively urban neighborhood, commanding a spectacular view of Fairmount Park, and just across the street from the Museum's main building, the new galleries and study centers showcase some of the Museum's most comprehensive, colorful, and cutting-edge collections.
The Waterworks
Available Year-Round
Philadelphia was the first city in the Colonies to regard the consistent delivery of safe drinking water to its citizens as a municipal responsibility. It named a Watering Committee in the late 1700’s which eventually had the Water Works built on the eastern banks of the Schuylkill River. Learn about the history of the Water Works - its many lives (including how the Art Museum came to be built on top of the old reservoir), its almost demise, and its revitalization.
Sponsors
Accessible Programs are generously funded by the Women's Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Betty Harbison Memorial Fund, Morton Charlestein. The Joseph Kennard Skilling Trust, and the Boscia Family Foundation.
For more information, please contact Accessible Programs by e-mail at .
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