Feeling by touch provides vision to the visually impaired

WARREN Logan's hands skim the 15th-century marble bust, tracing the lifeless eyes, the slightly agape mouth, the precisely chiselled fur.He is blind, but he can see.

A new touch tour at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, is among programs at more than 100 US museums that attempt to do what once was thought impossible: make art accessible to those with little or no sight.

"I get a good picture of the art," says 14-year-old Logan. "I can actually visualise it."
In the Nelson-Atkins program, participants first feel pieces of slate and marble, the materials from which the works they will touch are made.

Later, specially trained teachers guide the hands of the visually impaired across 500-year-old Spanish tomb covers, an Italian bust of St John the Baptist and pieces by celebrated modernist sculptor Henry Moore, asking them questions about their perceptions and filling them in on the history of the piece.

Tina Jinkens, who is blind, dreaded class trips to the museum as a child. But now her face fills with delight as she comes into contact with art.

"I always felt like I didn't get that much out of it," Jinkens recalls. "But if someone can put their hands on a sculpture and really get something out of an exhibit, it may open up new worlds to them."

Art museums first began to make their collections accessible to the visually impaired in the early 1970s, but the concept took its time to catch on; it is only now that leading museums such as Nelson-Atkins are implementing such programs.

The Form in Art initiative at the Philadelphia Museum of Art was among the first to reach out to the blind. The three-year program combines the study of art history, tactile examinations of objects in the museum's collections, and participants' own creation of artwork.

Because original paintings can never be touched, the Philadelphia Museum makes reproductions that may emphasise the heavy brush strokes of van Gogh or another artist's signature elements, or models that use materials such as glass to represent water or cloth for a lamb, or black-and-white interpretations that allow someone with limited vision to more easily see the contrast.

The museum offers tours for the visually impaired that include more than 50 touchable pieces.
Street Thoma, who heads the Philadelphia Museum's accessibility programs, says a blind person's initial visit to the museum can yield a strong reaction. "When a blind person thinks of an art museum in society, they think, 'That's not for me'," Thoma says. "The feeling that the person [now] gets is, 'Wow. I can be a part. I'm not cut out of this. I'm not isolated. I'm not alone."'
The sentiments are repeated in other art museums. In Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts' tour for the blind sometimes makes use of poetry or music.

At the Umlauf Sculpture Garden in Austin, Texas, visually impaired visitors can listen to an audio guide that instructs them where to reach, what to feel and the history behind the piece.
And at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where touch tours have been available since 1972, those without sight can lay their hands on masterpieces by such important artists as Picasso, Matisse and Rodin.

"Really, what these individuals are doing is what many people want to do when they visit the museum, which many people do when the guards aren't looking," says Francesca Rosenberg, head of MoMA's accessibility programs.

There has been resistance, however, to the idea that blind or visually impaired people can benefit from the visual arts and develop a mental image from it. When Art Education for the Blind was founded in New York in 1987 to advocate access to museum collections, many questioned the group's mission.

"People would laugh," says Nina Levent, associate director of the organisation. "They thought it was a ridiculous idea."

John Kennedy, a University of Toronto at Scarborough professor whose 1993 book, Drawing and the Blind, is considered the seminal work on the subject, says those without sight can often experience art with the same level of understanding as those with full vision.

"Sculptures make perfect sense for the blind, but blind people also understand pictures," he says. "The image formed in the blind person's mind is, in most important respects, identical to the image formed in the sighted person's mind."

Kennedy doesn't find it easy to convince people of his stunning claim that a blind person might come up with a mental image close to that of a sighted person.

There were no naysayers, however, when a small group of young people crowded the Nelson-Atkins museum's mezzanine sculpture gallery for a tour.

Shirley Cottrell beamed as her nine-year-old granddaughter, Brooke, reached to caress a piece taller than her. She could feel every little groove, Cottrell said. She could see.