| In 1980, I saw the large-scale sculpture of Picasso's Head of a Woman in the Plaza in Chicago. Forty feet tall, it could only be experienced with eyesight. In front of the monumental sculpture was a podium. On that podium stands a machette of the piece, in steel, 18 inches tall, with English, Spanish, and Braille descriptions in bronze. He designed it so that those who are visually impaired can still feel it and experience the work to better understand the monument that stands before them. |
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Ms. Shalit opened those doors, and continues to do so. In 1995, I worked at the Braille Institute of America in Los Angeles as an Art Instructor and Transition Specialist ( beginning as a volunteer in their art department in Santa Barbara in 1992). I learned so much from my students, their perceptions concerning art, their priorities as to what made a work of art, that I started to design work that could be investigated by touch, rather than sight. |
| Around the same time I had learned about Willa Shalit's sculptural portraits of famous people, and how she arranged the exhibitions so that |
the visually impaired could touch the bronze busts and experience the facial features of those that they may have only heard about, but never seen. |
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This, in turn, led me to consider creating an exhibition where touch would be more important than vision in experiencing the artwork. |
