Meredith Lehman, head of museum education for the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, has won a 2021 IDEA Award from the Arts and Culture Accessibility Cooperative (ACAC).
The IDEA Awards recognize individuals, organizations, initiatives and arts supporters for fostering inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility in the greater St. Louis cultural landscape. Lehman, who joined the Kemper Art Museum in 2019, was cited for her work in redesigning the museum’s student educator training curriculum to explore the relationship between museums and structural injustice and offer tools to facilitate conversations around race and identity.
Lehman also shepherded the museum’s participation in the 2021 Deaf Visual Arts Festival, including an American Sign Language tour of the exhibition “Christine Sun Kim: Stacking Traumas.” Lehman is currently organizing a poetry program — held in conjunction with the upcoming exhibition “Nicole Miller: A Sound, a Signal, the Circus” — that will be hosted by St. Louis’ Griot Museum of Black History.
The ACAC is organized by MindsEye, a nonprofit based in Belleville, Ill., and serving individuals who are blind or have low vision. Other IDEA Award recipients include St. Louis’ Metro Theatre Company, the Sumner Recovery Plan, the Kranzberg Arts Foundation and Missouri Arts Council special initiatives coordinator Ginny Sanders. For more information, visit mindseyeradio.org.
