Consider a pattern documented repeatedly in accessibility reviews of large, historic museum buildings across Europe and North America: galleries reachable only by stairs; tactile engagement with objects discouraged as a matter of conservation policy; rest seating distributed on the assumption that visitors are capable of sustained upright movement through long sequences of rooms.Footnote 1
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s South Kensington building in London, one of the most visited museums in the world, illustrates the pattern. The museum’s own access guidance describes the building as “an old building that has been added to over the years,” with accessible routes added in different parts of it rather than built in as a single design.Footnote 2 These are good interventions; they are also rearguard actions, repairs to a structure whose fundamental grammar was never written with disabled visitors in mind. The ramp retrofitted to a Victorian staircase does not change the staircase: it adds an alternative route to a destination that was always imagined as reachable by climbing. The audio guide appended to a label written for sighted readers does not reconceive the communicative relationship between object and visitor; it translates a text into a different sensory channel. What disability scholars call the “medical model” of disability—the view that disability is a deficiency located in the individual body, to be remedied by interventions targeted at that body—operates quietly but powerfully inside these conventional accessibility strategies.
This article proposes a different starting point: what changes in a museum’s practice (architecturally, curatorially, institutionally) when disability is treated not as a deficit to be accommodated after the fact, but as a standpoint from which the museum’s own normative assumptions become visible?
Crip theory, developed from the late 1990s onward by scholars including Robert McRuer, Carrie Sandahl, Philip Auslander, and Alison Kafer, takes the “social model” of disability as its premise and pushes it further: disability is not a problem of individual bodies but an effect of social, architectural, and cultural norms that produce some bodies as standard and others as deviant.Footnote 3 Where the social model calls for barrier removal, crip theory asks what is revealed when we treat those barriers as symptoms of deeper normative structures. Applied to museums, crip theory invites us to ask not only how disabled visitors can access what museums offer, but how disability, as a critical standpoint, might transform what museums offer altogether.
Crip theory identifies the museum as a threshold, a boundary, the point at which one space ends and another begins. For many disabled visitors, the museum is a boundary crossed only with difficulty or not at all, but a threshold is also a site of possibility: the place where entry becomes thinkable, where the terms of belonging are negotiated rather than assumed.
1. What critical museology adds
Critical museology has spent four decades interrogating the museum as a site of power. From Tony Bennett’s account of the museum as a technology of civic discipline to Richard Sandell’s argument that museums have both the capacity and the responsibility to challenge social prejudice to Sharon Macdonald’s ethnographic studies of exhibition-making as a negotiation among competing institutional, curatorial, and public interests, the field has developed sophisticated tools for reading the museum not as a neutral repository of culture but as an institution that actively shapes what counts as knowledge, whose histories matter, and which publics are imagined as its audience.Footnote 4 Critical museology asks how museums encode power along axes of race, gender, class, and national belonging, and it has, for most of its history, treated disability as one item on a longer list of exclusions rather than as a standpoint that changes the analytic itself—as a lens that reorganizes not just which objects and stories are represented, but how the museum’s spatial, temporal, and interpretive grammar is built in the first place.
A body of scholarship at the intersection of disability studies and museum studies has begun to close this gap, most substantially Sandell, Dodd, and Garland-Thomson’s edited collection Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum, whose contributors, among them Garland-Thomson’s own analysis of how classical portrait conventions can lend disabled subjects the same cultural capital traditionally reserved for non-disabled sitters, examine specific exhibitions and activist curatorial interventions in fine grain.Footnote 5 The present article shares that collection’s premise but works at a different level of analysis. Rather than analyzing how particular objects or exhibitions represent disability, it asks what happens when disability reorganizes an institution’s underlying logic: its architecture, its temporality, and its account of who its public is presumed to be. Sandell’s monograph, Museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of Difference, is particularly important for this move.Footnote 6 Sandell examined how museums have engaged with questions of race, sexuality, and disability, arguing that curatorial choices are always also ethical choices: the frame through which an object or story is presented encodes assumptions about who visitors are and what they already know and feel.
Crip theory and critical museology emerged from different disciplinary homes (the former from queer theory and disability studies, the latter from museum studies and the sociology of culture) and describing them as “natural interlocutors” overstates a convergence that is neither inevitable nor automatic. It is more accurate, and more analytically useful, to treat them as complementary: each supplies something the other, on its own, lacks. Critical museology gives crip theory an institutional grammar, a vocabulary for collecting policy, label-writing, spatial sequencing, and curatorial authority, that crip theory, developed largely in relation to embodiment, performance, and cultural representation, does not itself provide. Crip theory, in turn, gives critical museology something even its disability-focused branch has generally lacked: a reason to ask not only who is represented in the museum, but who the museum assumes will be doing the looking, the standing, and the reading. Both are suspicious of institutions that claim universal reach while encoding particular, often exclusionary, norms, and both insist that what looks like a neutral decision (where to place a bench, how to write a label, what objects to collect) is always a decision about whose experience is taken as the standard.
Crip theory finds museums productive for a further reason, beyond the fact that they are physical spaces with stairs and doors. As Tobin Siebers argues, disability is not incidental to the history of aesthetic judgment but constitutive of it: modern art repeatedly stages the disabled or non-normative body as the site where the category of “the aesthetic” itself is tested and remade.Footnote 7 Museums are the institutions that most explicitly claim the authority to define and display aesthetic value in public life. If Siebers is right that disability is bound up with the formation of aesthetic judgment rather than external to it, then the museum is not simply one site among others where crip theory happens to be applicable; it is a site where crip theory’s claims about embodiment and normativity are already, if silently, at stake in the institution’s core business.
2. Three scenes of disability and the museum
The three cases examined below—the Smithsonian, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, and the Museum of Modern Art—do not represent standard museum practice; most museums do considerably less than any of the three. These cases span the three main registers in which disability has entered contemporary museum practice: as a design philosophy built in from the outset (the Smithsonian), as a formal institutional standard achieved after the fact through certification (the Thyssen-Bornemisza), and as an ongoing, evolving relationship with disabled communities rather than a fixed deliverable (MoMA). Read in sequence, these examples trace a conceptual arc from accommodation to certification to co-production.Footnote 8
2.1. Universal Design and the Smithsonian
The Smithsonian Institution began developing what it would come to call its “universal design” approach in the early 1990s, partly in response to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, partly through the influence of disability advocates who pushed the institution to move beyond minimum compliance. Universal design, as the Smithsonian and others have theorized it, differs from accessibility retrofit in a fundamental way: rather than modifying a design after the fact to accommodate disabled users, it begins with the premise that the full range of human variation in mobility, perception, and cognition should be taken into account from the outset of the design process.Footnote 9
This early process was shaped, from the start, by disabled advocates working from inside and alongside the institution, an institutional expression, however partial, of the principle articulated within disability and crip activism as “nothing about us without us”: that decisions about disabled people’s environments and representation should not be made without disabled people’s direct participation in making them.
The implications extend beyond visible physical disability. A universal design approach to labeling, for example, does not simply add a Braille translation beneath a printed text; it asks whether the information hierarchy of the label works for a visitor who cannot see it at all, or one who cannot stand close to it, or one who needs more time to process text, or one for whom the standard institutional prose of museum labels is alienating. These considerations address physical, sensory, and cognitive disability together, including disabilities that are not visually apparent, such as chronic pain conditions, some forms of neurodivergence, and processing differences that affect how much information a visitor can absorb in a given space of time. Often, the result is a label that is better for everyone: clearer, more direct, more attentive to what the visitor actually needs to know.
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History has developed multi-sensory stations throughout its halls where visitors can touch casts of objects normally protected behind glass, hear recordings that contextualize what they are seeing, and engage with content at multiple levels of complexity. These stations were designed with disabled visitors in mind, but they have also become, according to the museum educators who staff them, a point of reference for visitors more broadly, including children and visitors simply tired of looking at things they cannot touch.Footnote 10 This is roughly what crip theory would predict: when an institution designs for the edge cases of human variation, it often discovers that the edge is where the most interesting design problems, and solutions, live.
Universal design is not, however, a resolved achievement.
Hamraie, whose history of universal design underlies much of this section, is also one of its sharpest critics, asking who counts as the “universal” user it designs for—historically, often white, American, and physically rather than cognitively disabled bodies—even as the category claimed to speak for disability in general.Footnote 11 A “one-size-fits-all” solution can flatten real differences in access needs as easily as it can accommodate them: a multi-sensory station calibrated for one kind of sensory processing may not serve, and may even overwhelm, a visitor with a different one. Universal design’s real achievement, on this view, is not that it has solved accessibility, but that it has made the question of who counts as a “universal” visitor an explicit, contestable design decision rather than an invisible default, which is itself a crip-theoretical move, even where the institutions practicing it do not describe it in those terms.
2.2. Accessibility as institution: the Thyssen-Bornemisza and the limits of certification
The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid is not a museum defined by medicine or embodiment, but a major encyclopedic collection that has made universal accessibility a formal institutional priority. Holding a universal accessibility certificate awarded by AENOR (Asociación Española de Normalización y Certificación), Spain’s national standardization body, the Thyssen has integrated disability access into its operational management, physical infrastructure, and educational programming in ways that go well beyond minimum legal compliance. The question crip theory invites us to ask is what this integration reveals about the institution’s deeper assumptions, and where, despite its ambitions, those assumptions remain intact.
Among Thyssen’s most notable initiatives is its “Touch to Explore” program, which offers tactile relief reproductions of canonical paintings from the permanent collection (Cranach, Caravaggio, Hals, and Hopper), designed for visitors who are blind or have low vision.Footnote 12 The program makes tangible something that conventional museum logic treats as exclusively visual: the texture, depth, and spatial relationships of painted surfaces.
Yet a touch program of this kind also raises a question that Kleege, writing as a blind scholar of literature and art, poses sharply: touch tours and tactile reproductions, however well-intentioned, can remain a segregated mode of access as a separate, supplementary channel offered to blind and low-vision visitors alongside, rather than integrated into, the museum’s standard visual experience.Footnote 13 Kleege’s account of her own encounters with museum touch programs suggests that genuine access is something other than a one-sided act of institutional generosity extended to a minority of visitors; it requires rethinking the default visual experience itself, not only adding a parallel one alongside it. Measured against that standard, “Touch to Explore” is a genuine achievement, and, at the same time, precisely the kind of intervention an accessibility certificate can register without asking whether it has changed the museum’s primary mode of address.
Also significant is the museum’s commitment to Spanish Sign Language (LSE), with dedicated resources linking the collection’s art-historical content to deaf visitors not through translation but through the expressive resources of a distinct visual language.Footnote 14 Its “Easy Read Guide” (“Museo Fácil”), for visitors with cognitive or reading difficulties, was developed through a 2018–2019 participatory working group of people with intellectual disabilities from the AMÁS Fácil program, easy-read specialists, and museum educators, who selected, tested, and validated its content directly.Footnote 15
Yet crip theory asks us to look carefully at what a certification model cannot capture. The AENOR certificate measures conformity to standards: it tells us that ramps exist, that induction loops function, that tactile resources are available. What it cannot measure is whether disability is understood as a mode of knowing: whether the perspectives of disabled visitors have shaped what the collection means, how it is sequenced, what counts as a significant object or a valuable response. The Thyssen’s accessibility policy document describes its goal as ensuring that disabled people can “engage in its activities,” a formulation that positions the institution as stable and the visitor as the variable to be accommodated.Footnote 16
Crip theory would push further: not can disabled visitors engage with what the Thyssen already is, but how might disabled visitors change what the Thyssen becomes?
2.3. MoMA’s access programs: community as method
The Museum of Modern Art’s Access Programs have operated since the mid-1980s, making them among the oldest sustained museum accessibility initiatives in the United States. What has distinguished MoMA’s approach over time is its emphasis on relationship, on building ongoing connections with communities of disabled visitors rather than offering discrete accommodations to individual visitors with particular needs.Footnote 17 The programs include gallery sessions for visitors with Alzheimer’s and their caregivers, studio programs for visitors with developmental and intellectual disabilities, sessions for blind, low-vision, Deaf, and hard-of-hearing visitors, and sensory-friendly events. Each program has evolved through sustained dialogue with participants and disability advocates, generating knowledge that feeds back into the museum’s broader practice. This is an example, at institutional scale, of the community-engaged approach to access that disability and crip activism has long argued all museums should adopt.
From a crip theory perspective, what is most significant about MoMA’s model is its epistemological dimension. The programs have not only brought disabled visitors into the museum; they have brought disabled ways of knowing into the institution’s understanding of its own practice. Museum educators who lead “Meet Me at MoMA” report, in program materials and staff testimony, that visitors with dementia sometimes notice associative connections, emotional resonances, and formal qualities in artworks that a formal training in art history does not obviously prepare one to see. This is not, if the observation holds, a sentimental claim about the compensatory gifts of disability; it would be evidence that different cognitive and perceptual orientations produce different knowledge, and that the institution loses something when those orientations are excluded from the conversation. It should be said plainly, however, that this specific claim currently rests on staff testimony rather than on a published, controlled evaluation, and I flag it as such rather than presenting it with more certainty than it currently has.
MoMA’s own account of its programming has begun, in recent years, to echo this article’s own language directly. Alongside “Meet Me at MoMA”, the museum now runs “Disability Art Chats”, a distinct program explicitly for visitors who identify as disabled, crip, Mad, or C/S/X, which the museum’s own program description states uses “a crip perspective” to generate fresh interpretations of its collection.Footnote 18 An institution that a decade ago spoke largely in the language of accommodation now, in part, speaks in the language of crip theory itself—not because a theorist proposed it from outside, but because sustained relationships with disabled communities changed what the institution understood itself to be doing.
What would it mean to generalize that shift beyond a single program to an institution’s core practice? The curator and disability studies scholar Amanda Cachia, writing from inside curatorial practice, has proposed one answer: she describes the curator who takes disability seriously as an “infrastructural activist,” someone who treats access not as an add-on to a finished exhibition but as a condition that reshapes what gets exhibited, how, and by whom it is authored in the first place.Footnote 19 That is a considerably more demanding standard than the one implicit in universal design or certification. It asks not only whether a museum’s spaces and labels are accessible, but whether disabled people are involved in deciding what a museum collects, how its exhibitions are sequenced, and who curates them, which are questions of governance and authorship, not only of design.
3. The museum as threshold
The three cases examined here are united by a common move: each, in its own way, treats disability not as a problem to be solved outside the museum’s core practice but as a resource for rethinking what that practice is.
In each case, that move produces exactly what crip theory would anticipate: when disabled people are genuinely centered, when their experience is taken as a starting point rather than an afterthought, the normative assumptions of the institution become visible; and once visible, they become available for critique and transformation. A museum that installs a ramp and calls the problem solved has crossed one threshold but not another. A museum that takes disability seriously as a mode of knowing, that allows disabled experience to reshape its curatorial practice, its design philosophy, its governance, and its understanding of what it is for, is crossing a different and more demanding threshold.
A museum’s practice changes when disability is treated as a source of knowledge rather than a population to accommodate. First, design decisions, from label text to gallery layout, improve for a broad range of visitors when they are built around the full range of human variation from the outset rather than retrofitted for an assumed edge case, though, as Hamraie’s critique of universal design insists, the range of variation designed for must itself remain a live, revisable question rather than a solved one. Second, institutional certification and compliance regimes can verify that access exists without verifying that it has changed anything about how the institution understands its own collection or its public; closing that gap requires the kind of direct, sustained relationship with disabled communities that MoMA’s Access Programs, and Cachia’s model of curatorial infrastructural activism, both point toward. Third, and most demandingly, taking disability seriously as epistemology means treating disabled participation not as an outreach activity running alongside curatorial practice, but as a condition of curatorial practice itself. This requires a redistribution of authority over what is collected, how it is displayed, and whose responses count as knowledge, guided by the principle, already operative within disability and crip activism, that decisions about disabled people’s access to public culture should not be made without disabled people making them.
This is also where my argument’s own limits are clearest, and I want them on the record rather than smoothed over. The evidentiary base for the three cases examined here is institutional self-documentation and secondary scholarship, not sustained fieldwork with disabled visitors, artists, or activists; where a disabled voice enters this article directly, in Kleege’s critique of touch tours or in MoMA’s own recent adoption of explicitly crip-informed programming, it enters through existing publications rather than through interviews I conducted myself. An article arguing that institutions should not make decisions about disabled people’s access to public culture without disabled people making them is vulnerable to a version of the same charge if it analyzes museums’ disability programming entirely through institutional and secondary sources. That tension does not invalidate the argument, but it does mark the next step this line of inquiry needs to take: toward research built with, rather than only about, disabled museum visitors, artists, and staff.
None of this makes the three museums examined here failures. The Smithsonian’s stations, the Thyssen’s certification, and MoMA’s community programs are all, in their different registers, real achievements. It does mean that “accessible” is a floor, not a ceiling, creating a connection between the museum as threshold and the public humanities more generally. The public humanities’ governing claim is that the questions the humanities ask—about meaning, value, representation, belonging—are a shared inheritance rather than the exclusive property of the academy, or, for that matter, of the museum professional. Disabled people have long been expert negotiators of environments, institutions, and representations built without them in mind. A museum that lets that expertise reshape its curatorial practice, its governance, and its understanding of what it is for is not simply more inclusive. It is doing, more fully, the specific thing the public humanities ask museums to do: to make the life of the mind a shared, not a restricted, inheritance.
Author contribution
Investigation, Resources: B.S.
Conflict of interests
The author declares no competing interests.
Open access
