Profile: Art-Reach

Those of us who love the arts are happy to talk at length about what we get out of partaking of our favorite art forms — the intellectual, emotional, and often spiritual benefits we enjoy from hearing music, walking through art galleries, or attending live performances, whether plays, operas, or ballets.

Okay, now go back and reread that last paragraph and think about how much we’re take for granted — from the fact that we can afford tickets and easily get to the venue to the fact that we have full benefit of our senses to experience, and our cognition to make sense of, the artwork.

The folks at Art-Reach have thought about that — and, more importantly, they’ve done something about it.

“Art-Reach connects underserved audiences to the arts,” says Marion Young, the program’s executive director. “These include people with all forms of disability — physical, mental, cognitive — as well as people who are economically disadvantaged.” In fact, she says, about 95 percent of the 17,000 people they serve every year are low income, and about 75 percent are dealing with disabilities as usually defined.

Connecting with the arts

The program connects people to the arts in several ways. First, Art-Reach distributes free and discounted tickets to 125 different venues in the Philadelphia region. “We have a very wide definition of ‘arts,’” Young says, so those venues include everything from the Academy of Music to the Zoo.

Beyond simply providing tickets, however, Art-Reach works with venues to make their facilities accessible at a more meaningful level. They provide training for venue staff who might be eager to be more accommodating but unsure how to go about it. This can range from the etiquette of dealing with people with disabilities to helping with captioning, visual descriptions, and ASL interpreters. Through their partnership with the national arts and disability organization VSA, Art-Reach can also help with access to low-cost rental equipment for theaters.

The multi-faceted strategy for increasing accessibility is clear in Art-Reach’s partnership with the Kimmel Center. “They’ve been providing ASL [American sign language] interpreters for about two years. Now we’re working with them to provide audio descriptions” for the visually impaired, Young says. This included a sensory tour before a recent performance of Once at the Academy of Music. “We arranged to bring a blind [person] up on stage before the show,” Young says. “A volunteer described the set for her, so she got more of a feel for what the setting of the performance was like.” They plan to do more of this as part of the Kimmel’s Broadway Philadelphia season.

“We serve as a resource for the cultural community,” Young explains. “We help them reach new audiences by showing them how to improve accessibility.”

In addition to bringing their constituents to the arts, Art-Reach brings the arts to their constituents, by organizing art workshops in facilities. “The artists are of all types,” Young says, “from musicians — percussionists, flautists, violinists — to theater people who do story-telling and acting, to visual artists in a wide variety of media.” A lot of these artists, she says, “start out because they view it as an extra source of income, but most find that they enjoy working with the various groups, that it gives them a new way of experiencing their own work.”

Art Connection

One of Art-Reach’s newest endeavors is Art Connection. This program, now in its second year, puts original works of art into facilities that don’t have the wherewithal to purchase it themselves. “These works of arts can inspire people, and can serve as a wonderful addition to the service work that these treatment centers and residential facilities are doing,” Young says.

People — both artists and collectors — donate these original works to an Art Bank. The clients and staff of the participating facility come together and choose five to ten pieces from the bank that will get permanent homes in the facility. “Those who will be impacted by the art are central to the process,” Young says. “They discuss why the art inspires them, how they connect with it. [The process] enables people to learn the language of the visual arts.”

The experience doesn’t end there. After choosing their works, the group will a museum trip that will allow them to put the new works into context. They’ll also participate in an art-making event, which might be taught by an artist who created a work they chose, or by an artist working in a similar medium.

To learn more about Art-Reach — including how you can get involved — visit their website here.