In recent decades, museums and galleries have made a sensory turn when it comes to designing displays and engaging visitors.
Museums like the Metropolitan in New York offer multi-sensory activities so visitors so can smell, touch and hear art, and museums have curated exhibitions about the senses.
The move is part of larger efforts to make public institutions more accessible.
It’s also aligned with museum and gallery institutional efforts to decolonize governance structures, and widen opportunities for museum and gallery participation from Indigenous and Global South artists and their communities, who have long been marginalized. Museums and galleries have sought to shape policy, reinterpret and repatriate artifacts stolen from Indigenous and Global South societies in response to social movements, community advocacy and decolonial theory.
