Brooklyn-based artist Finnegan Shannon, who is disabled, has often wondered what it would be like to experience art without limitations. Shannon, who has trouble standing and walking and experiences pain doing both, dreamed of a museum exhibit where they could sit down — and the artwork would come to them.
“As an artist, I’m excited about seeing other artwork,” they explained. “Often museum or gallery visits are not structured in a way that feels easy or supportive.”
Shannon, whose most recent exhibit, “Don’t mind if I do,” is on display at the Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA) until June 28, wasn’t new to probing these limitations. In “Do you want us here or not,” an exhibit commissioned before the COVID-19 pandemic, Shannon created a series of benches and cushions designed for museum spaces. On them were potent messages imbued with their signature sarcasm: “This exhibition has asked me to stand for too long. Sit if you agree,” one read. And another: “It was hard to get here. Rest if you agree.”
But Shannon wanted to create more than a series of moments. They wanted to curate an experience.
“What happens when you share your fantasy with different communities, and how does that teach us what we might want and need?” they asked.
In 2022, Shannon reached out to Lauren Leving, then the curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (moCa) in Cleveland, whose work she explored how creative practice informs accessibility within arts institutions.
Leving, who had been following Shannon’s work, helped them conceptualize the mechanics of an exhibit where the patrons could stay put, and the art would seek them out. She hired a technical director, Peter Reese, who built a conveyor belt that could carry interactive art to people sitting around a table. Shannon wanted to include more artists, so Leving began studio visits with Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Pelenakeke Brown, Sky Cubacub, Emilie L. Gossiaux, Felicia Griffin, Joselia Rebekah Hughes and Jeff Kasper. Because the exhibit would be shown across the country, Leving sought out artists convenient to each location.
From 2023 to 2025, “Don’t mind if I do” ran at moCa Cleveland; the University Library at California State University, Sacramento; and the University of Illinois Chicago. The SCMA show, which opened in January, is its fourth stop on the ongoing tour.
On March13 from 4 to 8 p.m., SCMA welcomed visitors to “Don’t mind if I do” as part of their extended hours on the second Friday of each month. As the conveyor belt circulated, visitors encountered fluffy pompoms, colorful plastic pill bottles and a tissue box cover that looked like the outside of a cozy abode.
“The exhibit definitely made me stop and think about art and access to art in a whole new way,” said Christine Speek of Belchertown, who visited the event with her son, on break from Syracuse University. “The conveyor belt full of objects coming to me as I sat down made me think about how it’s difficult for some to walk around a museum.”
In one area of the exhibit, two wheelchairs were available for visitors to experience drawings at seat-height. “My son tried getting around in one to view the last area of the exhibit, while I walked through it,” said Speek. “I had to bend down to see the drawings closely, but for my son, in the wheelchair, they were at the perfect level.”
Others were genuinely confused, unsure of what they were permitted to do with the objects; presumably because it felt impolite, no one wanted to go on record about the experience.
Shannon and Leving weren’t surprised to hear that some people didn’t know what to do.
“I do think people approach museums with a lot of fear and anxiety,” said Shannon, “and a lot of stress around not understanding, doing the wrong thing and breaking the rules, [all] reinforced by harm museums have caused. We’re fighting against a lot of history.”
They cited a 2019 visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston by Black and brown middle schoolers surveilled by museum staffers, who also used racist language towards them. A year later, the museum created a $500,000 “diversity fund” in response.
Arts professionals, too, said Leving, are fighting entrenched values they’ve been taught to uphold. On the Chicago leg of the tour, she walked many professionals through the exhibit. “I think that’s where the modeling became really important,” she remembered. “Like, ‘I’m going to pick up this object, I invite you to pick it up with me.’ There was a lot of resistance, or people being like, ‘Can I touch this?’”
In Massachusetts, said Shannon, they tried to challenge norms with two aspects that were unique to the SCMA part of the tour. Postcards, available on the table as part of the exhibit, were created for participants to fill out that Smith College would later mail.
“[This] highlighted that we can share art with others in simple ways — again, bringing art to people, like the conveyor belt,” observed Speek.
Shannon was also excited to include the Phyllis Birkby Papers, housed at Smith College in the Sophia Smith Collection, in which the artist explores the women’s movement, lesbian feminism and consciousness raising through drawing. Birkby’s intentions, said Shannon, were rooted in the “public fantasizing” also at the heart of “Don’t mind if I do.”
At the end of March, Shannon gave a talk at SCMA about their overlapping propensity for fantasy, touching on sensory pleasures and the luxury of options.
Speaking of options, they learned a valuable lesson on a visit to one university’s disabled student cultural center, the first space of its kind they’d ever been in.
“One of the things in the room was a massaging chair,” said Shannon. “This whole time I could have been asking for a massaging chair and I was just asking for a bench.”
SCMA is open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is free. For more information, visit scma.smith.edu.
Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.
