JUDY WOODRUFF: And now a museum exhibition created by designers and brain researchers
that challenges our senses demonstrating how we all experience art differently.
Jeffrey Brown reports from Dallas, as part of our ongoing arts and culture series, Canvas.
JEFFREY BROWN: It's a kind of playground inside an art museum, large room-sized works in which
exploring the different ways each of us experiences the world around us is as important as the
art itself.
Now at the Dallas Museum of Art, the exhibition is titled Speechless: Different By Design.
It's unusual, in that touching and much more is encouraged, even required.
SARAH SCHLEUNING, Curator, Speechless: Different By Design: I became interested in, what happens
if we do an exhibition where it's interactive, where we encourage people to use all their
senses?
JEFFREY BROWN: Unusual, too, in how it began, in a very personal way for curator Sarah Schleuning,
when her now 6-year-old son Vaughn was first diagnosed with an expressive language disorder.
SARAH SCHLEUNING: Speechless is really quite literal, in that he was speechless for the
first several years of his life. And as we were navigating that as a family, we were
trying to figure out -- I'm a hyperverbal person.
JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.
SARAH SCHLEUNING: And what happens when I -- the words that I use and how I express
and communicate is no longer valid?
And I think that led me into these ideas of, what is disability? What does that mean? I
didn't think he was different. His sister doesn't think he's different. But he gets
out in the world, and people didn't know how to communicate with him, and it was very frustrating.
JEFFREY BROWN: And that led her to also re-think her work as a curator and how we all interact
in different ways with art.
For this exhibition, she asked artist-designers to bring those differences to life.
Ini Archibong,a California-born, Switzerland-based designer, created an installation title The
Oracle. It's made up of 10 pill-shaped synthesizers crafted of blown glass.
Museum visitors can move them, subtly altering the sounds in the room, even the color and
vibrations of a pool of water. The console controlling all this, "Wizard of Oz"-like,
is behind a wall.
Yuri Suzuki, Tokyo-born and London-based, created Sound of the Earth Chapter 2, a large
sphere that requires the visitor to experience it up close.
Suzuki gathered audio by crowdsourcing on Instagram, with people around the world sending
in clips of sounds of everyday life. Here, sounds substitutes for visual imagery we might
expect in a work of art.
And if I stay here long enough, I'm going to...
MAN: Yes, then you will get a nice -- get sort of hug.
JEFFREY BROWN: OK. Yes. Yes.
Most playful of all, Misha Kahn, a Brooklyn-based artist and furniture designer, who filled
a large room with strangely shaped sacs of hand-painted silk over vinyl, each covering
a wood sculpture inside, and all of it constantly inflating and deflating, so the whole room
seems to be breathing.
MISHA KAHN, Artist: Everything's touchable and you can kind of explore it. And, for me,
I wanted to find a way to sort of embed these sculptures and humanize them by having them
breathe and sort of shy away from you.
JEFFREY BROWN: Not only that, you can jump in and take a seat. And so we did.
Because sitting is the idea here, right?
MISHA KAHN: Yes. Well, I think...
JEFFREY BROWN: I mean experiencing it.
MISHA KAHN: Yes.
JEFFREY BROWN: You wanted to know if this would be perceived as a place to sit?
MISHA KAHN: Yes. And then, like, if you sort of think of it as a chair, then what else
is going on? And so it sort of pulls you into a different area. It activates your brain
in a slightly different way.
JEFFREY BROWN: And that is what Dan Krawczyk brought to the exhibition. Krawczyk is a brain
researcher and deputy director of the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas,
Dallas.
DAN KRAWCZYK, University of Texas, Dallas: We're essentially seeing how active the brain
is. It's a heat map of areas that are particularly active for some kind of process.
JEFFREY BROWN: In 2018, before the artists got to work, curator Sarah Schleuning brought
them together with scientists and medical researchers who study brain function, autism
and dementia and much more.
Dan Krawczyk was one of them.
DANIEL KRAWCZYK: I was excited by the possibility, because we don't often have these opportunities
to have a science-meets-art kind of conversation.
And I have long thought that especially visual arts has a very clear link within the brain.
And when you're a neuroscientist, you tend to always think, how does the brain become
active in different ways?
JEFFREY BROWN: The artists then did their thing. The design team of brothers Steven
and William Ladd created this room from hundreds of rolled-up, colorful scrolls of all sizes,
each made and initialed by a resident of Dallas or Atlanta.
The room entices the visitor to touch and feel or sit and meditate. Neuroscientist Krawczyk
was able to explain to the artists how their work alters perceptions.
DANIEL KRAWCZYK: I think that the major message I tried to inform them about is how dynamic
the brain is, that we don't just perceive. We're constantly perceiving with a goal to
act.
And the brain is constantly cycling between perceiving and then acting. And so I thought
there was a lot of exciting synergy with the way the brain really works, because we always
want to take the next action.
JEFFREY BROWN: Why would this kind of art be more accessible to someone who we would
call disabled, in terms of what's going on in the brain?
DANIEL KRAWCZYK: It's changing the inputs pretty dramatically, right? And that's going
to change the brain state quite dramatically.
So the range of options -- if you're more of a touch-based, exploratory person, you're
likely to get something very different out of these exhibits.
JEFFREY BROWN: And that, of course, is the point of this exhibition, which even includes
a so-called de-escalation room, where visitors can relax, with a weighted blanket, after
all the sensory stimulation.
Curator Sarah Schleuning hopes the exhibition can be part of a new model for museums.
SARAH SCHLEUNING: When we can offer experiences and opportunities that may change the way
that they see and perceive what art is, what a great thing to be, to not be locked in a
box.
It's OK to be different in the space, and you can still be surrounded and engaged in
the experience.
JEFFREY BROWN: The exhibition Speechless: Different By Design was a collaboration with
the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and travels there next.
For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Jeffrey Brown at the Dallas Museum of Art.