Celebrating the artistic vision of blind people

From The New York Times:

SAN FRANCISCO -- By the time the effects of Susan Kitazawa’s glaucoma crossed into legal blindness in February, they had already cost her a nursing career and countless freedoms. But they had also sparked a seize-the-day resolve in her and revived a long-buried, if now unlikely, ambition: to make visual art.

She had enrolled in a life drawing class near her home here but was frustrated that it took a narrower view of drawing, and of vision, than she was seeking.

“The teacher would say, ‘You’re not getting the shadow right on the model,’ ” Ms. Kitazawa, 62, explained recently. “I’d say: ‘Shadow? I can’t even see the model.’ I realized I wanted to create things out of the images I had in my head rather than what was in front of me.”

So she began working on her own, making abstract paintings and collages that were more consistent with how she saw the world: “like a cellphone connection that’s breaking up,” she said.

“I was talking to my cat the other day, and I realized it was my backpack,” Ms. Kitazawa added. “I think my work is about being lost, in part. How I see is sort of my subject.”

She showed in several small group exhibitions. It was not until this year, though, that her new legal status entitled her to apply for an annual juried show called “Insights,” where her collage “Do You See What I See?” — in which two circles of assorted scraps float dreamily over ethereal fields of red and magenta acrylic — is on view at the San Francisco City Hall.

Now in its 20th year, “Insights” is the country’s pre-eminent selected exhibition of paintings, photographs and mixed-media pieces by legally blind artists. What began as an event focused on works of purely tactile interest — just 13 the first year — has evolved into a show of some 120 pieces where the emphasis is on the visual, and on an interpretation of it more in line with the one Ms. Kitazawa had in mind.

“The exhibition is framed to be about limits and what can be done within them,” said Lawrence Rinder, the director of the Berkeley Art Museum, who was a juror for “Insights” this year. That thematic framing, he added, locates the show’s blind artists very much in the tradition of artists in general. “We all have limits of perception, and all artists work within that envelope.”

Charles Blackwell (pictured), who has about 20 pieces in the show — he is one of three featured artists — credits much of what is admired about his style to the limits of his impairment. He was a 19-year-old art student when a fall left him legally blind, with minimal peripheral vision. Forty years later he finds it easiest to see movement, so his jazz-theme ink drawings at City Hall have a feverish, frenetic feel.

“When I was young, I was training to do neat little sketches,” said Mr. Blackwell, who lives in San Mateo, Calif. “After losing my eyesight, I started doing bigger, freer, Rauschenberg-inspired work I remembered seeing when I was younger — more abstract, more electric, more colorful.”

The growth and shifting focus of “Insights” has paralleled a shift in wider-world perceptions of art by the visually impaired. Where once it was displayed mainly in places like community centers, “in the last couple years I’ve seen a number of shows by blind and visually impaired artists at mainstream venues,” said Nina Levent, the director of Art Education for the Blind and the Art Beyond Sight Institute in New York.

“There’s been a paradigm shift,” Ms. Levent continued. “People are starting to accept the fact that art and imagery are mental and not visual” and that “the heart of the creative work has nothing to do with sight. Artists’ choices are internal.”

That seemingly radical way of looking at visual art appears to be backed up by science. John M. Kennedy, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto and a leading researcher on blindness and art making, speaks of a revolution in understanding how the brain processes imagery.

“The evidence gathered in recent years shows that pictures and representation are a deep quality of the mind, even with the congenitally blind,” he said. “You can reach them through vision, but you can reach them in other ways too.”

In studying the activation of the visual cortex in brain scans of blind artists, Lotfi B. Merabet, an optometrist and an instructor in neurology at Harvard Medical School, has come to similar conclusions.

The art they make “is truly an expression of their mental imagery. It’s not about giving the sighted world what it wants to see,” Dr. Merabet said.

Pete Eckert, who lives in Sacramento, planned to study architecture as a young man but gave up when his retinitis pigmentosa was diagnosed and he began losing his eyesight. In time he found he could train his optic cortex to make images from his other senses. Now totally blind at 53, he is particularly attuned to sound and the ways it bounces off or is absorbed by objects. He can see a stop sign in his mind, he said, from traffic sounds wrapping around it, like water flowing around a stone.

Mr. Eckert not only worked as a carpenter for years while he was legally blind, but, as a black belt in tae kwon do, he could spar at full speed with sighted black belts.

“Then I decided maybe there’s a better way to express this perception than bopping people on the nose,” he said. “About that time I came across an old camera.”

Mr. Eckert’s wife taught him to use it. He frames his subjects through sound, touch and memory, and he shows his contact sheets to sighted friends for feedback before printing. He says his photography — much of it mixing blurred and static images, sometimes overlaid with scrawls of light — lets him explore the mysteries of his physical world “without being bound by the assumptions of the sighted.”

“Most sighted photographers I know use their eyes to search the world for photos,” he said. “With me, I’ve turned the camera around, toward my mind’s eye.” Like an increasing number of blind artists, Mr. Eckert — who was not selected for this year’s “Insights” but has shown there five times before — has often exhibited alongside sighted artists. Still, in spite of the growing acceptance, serious art by the visually impaired remains a category apart for most in the mainstream art world.

“There’s a tendency to always see them as ‘blind artists,’ in the way that women artists often end up in ‘women artists’ shows,” said Meg Shiffler, the gallery director for the San Francisco Arts Commission, which presented “Insights” with LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, a nonprofit agency. “It would be great it their work were better integrated.” But where some perceive ghettoization, others see good reason to spotlight an artist’s impairment. “What were the precise conditions of the Spanish Civil War when Picasso made ‘Guernica’?” Mr. Rinder said. “Knowing those details can illuminate a work further.”

And the perspective made possible by blindness may have another value in the art world. Ketra Oberlander, a painter and an agent for disabled artists in Santa Clara, Calif., began losing her vision in her 30s to cone dystrophy and high myopia; by 40 she was legally blind, unable to discern sharp borders, color or much contrast. Now 47, she said she paints flowers in close-up because that represents what she calls an intersection between two worlds: “It’s how sighted people tend to look at them and how I have to look at them.”

Ms. Oberlander was featured in the 2007 “Insights,” but this year brought a new role: She was tapped to be the show’s first blind juror. She studied each submission carefully on a laptop in a dark room, at times using a monocular telescope.

“I couldn’t find anyone who’d done this before, anywhere,” she said of the job. “In future art shows, whenever someone grumbles that, ‘The jurors must be blind,’ well, now they might be right.”