By Myra Ross | From BayLines Express, May, 2024
Thanks to an e-mail I received from Mary Haroyan and a comprehensive feature story I heard on WAMC Northeast Public radio out of Albany, New York, my husband and I went to the Chicopee Public Library to experience an amazing visiting art exhibit on portraiture through the ages. There are seven stations on individual tables that are about 2 feet by 4 feet in size. They contain large reliefs (like tactile relief maps) of some of the most famous portrait paintings in the world. Each represents a historical period of European portraiture, including Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-classical, Impressionist, Post-impressionist Expressionist, and Art Nouveau. The paintings included the Mona Lisa (Da Vinci), The Girl with the Pearl Earring (Vermeer), The Scream (Munch), a poster by Toulouse Lautrec, and portraits by Degas, Van Gogh and one other. The portraits appeared visually and in tactile relief, as on a map. You could feel the intricate visual detail. There were buttons on the front of the tables to press for information about the artist, the historical period of art, and the painting on each table. Small tactile sensors that activated spoken statements were positioned in various places on the paintings themselves so you could learn about the part of the painting on which they were placed. They presented physical descriptions and interpretive and factual information about the significance and meanings of clothing, facial expressions, jewelry, backgrounds, sky, and other features in the paintings — related to texture, complexity, and color. One could easily discern the features of the faces, garments, and backgrounds. I was particularly fascinated by the differences in the prominence of eyebrows! I left with a good general impression of the different portraits, able to visualize paintings I had heard about all my life, but never really understood.
The exhibit (Seven Art Movements) is one of many traveling tactile exhibits created by “Tactile Images” (https://tactileimages.com) from Chatham, New York, right over the Massachusetts border. Other exhibits depict historical, biographical, and scientific information. According to the website, they have been creating exhibits for museums, schools, and commercial organizations since 2008. “We make visual knowledge accessible for blind and visually impaired communities all over the world. We build custom kinesthetic creations that bring art, history, science, and more to life in the mind’s eye.”
Their intricate creative process includes “digital sculpting” of visual images to make them three-dimensional, printing them in 3D on an enormous printer, and then protecting the creations with multiple coats of hardeners. The process takes about ninety days. John Olson, the founder of Tactile Images, had a long career as a photographer, creating visual images for Life Magazine. He became interested in making images available to blind people and partnered with the NFB for more than ten years to learn what would work for blind people of all ages, and figure out how to develop it. His amazing exhibits have been enjoyed all over the world.