Tours for the Visually Impaired to be Offered At the San Antonio Museum of Art

Beginning Saturday, October 4, the Museum will offer docent-led tours for the blind and visually impaired the first Saturday of every month at 10:00 a.m., or by special arrangement. Tours include descriptive language, touch, sound, and smell to enhance the visitors’ experience with art. Visitors are able to touch various objects, such as textiles, painted earthenware, and other reproductions of works in the Museum’s collection. Guide dogs, sighted companions, and others are welcome, as are wheelchairs and other walking aids.

The Museum docents became interested in creating these tours after hearing Larry Johnson, chairman of Bexar County’s technical advisory committee for persons with disabilities, discuss etiquette when interacting with a visually impaired person. Johnson estimates that there are 40,000 visually impaired individuals in Bexar County.

“Museums around the world are implementing various ways for the visually impaired to experience art,” said Museum docent president Susanne O’Brien. “For instance, the Vatican Museum has Braille labels and the Metropolitan Museum of Art gives ‘touch tours’. We thought it was important for the San Antonio Museum of Art to include these tours, too.”

Currently, there are three tour topics. The Highlights Tour includes works from the ancient to the modern world and visits the Asian, European, Latin American, and ancient art galleries. Life, Death, and the Afterlife is an introduction to customs, rituals, and celebrations around the world and throughout history. Art in the Americas discusses stories, customs, and daily life of the peoples who have inhabited the Americas through the Museum’s Pre-Columbian, Spanish Colonial, American, and Latin American art collections.

Tours are being introduced during the evening of Friday, September 26, for the American Council for the Blind Texas Convention being held in San Antonio. For more information about Tour Topics for the Visually Impaired, visit www.samuseum.org or call (210) 978.8138. To make reservations, please call (210) 978.8138 or email tours@samuseum.org.

The San Antonio Museum of Art is housed in the historic Lone Star Brewery on the Museum Reach of the San Antonio Riverwalk. The collection contains more than 25,000 works representing 5,000 years of history and cultures from around the world.