In this image: Art Beyond Sight's logo.

Of all the many layers and strands of the New York City Disability Rights Movement, Art Beyond Sight is very likely the most significant piece you’ve never heard of.

In 1986, Elisabeth Salzhauer Axel was a graduate student studying Art History at Harvard University. A relapsing and remitting neurological disorder had caused her several bouts of vision impairment, to the point of legal blindness, and this led Axel to ponder how visual art could be brought to people unable to see. When her proposal to pursue this question through her school’s education degree program was denied, on the grounds that she lacked relevant teaching experience, Axel sought to obtain some.

She found no takers. Only two museums in the New York City area had any programs for blind people: the Met had a “touch closet” adjoining a classroom, where objects could be explored tactilely, and there was something similar at the Museum of American Folk Art. Forced to invent a curriculum and find a venue, Axel reached out to cognitive psychologists, artists, art historians and educators and put together a class that covered arts concepts and art history, and provided experiential modalities via 3d models, sound imagery, and line drawings using “puffy paint,” a substance that creates a raised texture. With a classroom space provided by the Guild for the Blind, her first student body consisted of nine blind adults (including Axel’s grandmother, an artist who was losing her vision).

The course was a success. But rather than returning to graduate school, Axel started a not-for-profit organization—Art Education for the Blind. She delved deeply into creating verbal, tactile, and auditory means by which blind people could understand visual representation, and even create visual art themselves. After a decade of working in this field, Axel’s not-for-profit published an astonishing six volume series entitled “Art History Through Touch and Sound: A Multisensory Guide for the Blind and Visually Impaired,” and a book, “Art Beyond Sight,” through the American Printing House for the Blind and the Museum of Modern Art.

In this Image: a photo of members of Art Beyond Sight and Project Access NYC, posing with signs and banners at the first Disability Pride Parade, July 22, 2015.

Art Education for the Blind began working with school age children and teachers to meet independent living skills goals through the arts. It conducted studies with the Museum of Modern Art documenting that the aesthetic understanding of sightless people develops in much the same way as sighted people, once effective education pathways are established. And it developed disability inclusion programs at numerous museums.

Her group’s multi-sensory techniques began being used by other disability communities as well. Convinced that the walls between the arts and disability were entirely porous, Axel broadened her organization’s mission and renamed it Art Beyond Sight (or ABS).

Axel’s group continued to accumulate proof of the aesthetic capabilities of blind people, even those who are born without vision and consequently have no visual memories to draw upon. She cites Paul Gabias, a blind psychologist, John Kennedy, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, and Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a brain scientist at Harvard, for studies demonstrating that blind people can visualize objects and understand visual concepts like perspective, while ABS’ own education work likewise showed that blind people can be fluent even in concepts, such as light/dark and color, that are inherently abstract for them.

Along the way, Axel encountered professional artists such as Esref Armagan, a Turkish painter who was born without eyesight, and other creatives able to translate visual art into another medium, such as Lou Giansante, who composed a critically well received auditory version of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending A Staircase.

Eventually, ABS’ work came to the attention of the Obama Administration, where Axel co-chaired a White House working group, Project Access for All. The project developed disability inclusion trainings at federal agencies, and changes to federal funding guidelines for cultural institutions.

In this image: a photo of Elisabeth Axel holding up the Art Beyond Sight banner at the first Disability Pride Parade, July 22, 2015.

At the invitation of Matt Sapolin, then the Commissioner of the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities (or MOPD), Axel brought this experience back to New York City and co-created Project Access NYC, which highlights best practices for disability and the arts. Together with the Department of Cultural Affairs, ABS hosted the first disability inclusion training for trustees and staff of all City-funded cultural organizations.

Since then, ABS has continued its intertwined missions of furthering people’s participation in arts culture--as consumers, as staff, and as creators. It established an arts and disability residency program, now in its seventh year, which provides emerging disabled artists with opportunities to interact with peers, galleries, and major cultural institutions. For the National Endowment for the Arts website and with the U.S. Department of Labor, ABS created a toolkit for people with disabilities to become artists and cultural workers. Most recently, Art Beyond Sight responded to COVID pandemic isolation by creating, with Project Access NYC and MOPD, a first-of-its-kind disability-centered online cultural events and performance space called Disability Unite (www.disabilityunite.org).

In this image: a photo of Esref Armagan, a congenitally blind painter, surrounded by several of his works.

ABS continues to expand its already broad goals, so much so that the organization has become involved in disability political activism. As Axel explains the linkage between artistic culture and activism, “the disability community is completely intersectional--necessarily part of the fight for equity in underrepresented communities, and more impacted than most by social justice movements and environmental factors. And because art is inevitably the product of its time, the arts in the disability community carries with it the need for artists to speak out, and to educate allies and the community.” Axel is on the Executive Committee of the 504 Democratic Club, and is a leader in its Businesses Committed to Access and Inclusion (or BCAI), which works to close the accessibility gap for would-be customers with disabilities. And ABS co-produced the first several Disability Pride Parades.

In keeping with its not-for-profit mission and Axel’s philosophy that the arts are for everyone, ABS’ collaborations and educational efforts are conducted not only free of charge, but without requiring primary attribution (this is a big part of the reason why its work is probably unknown to you). “We try as much as possible to create a culture of sharing, so that it just becomes a new normal.”

There is, of course, a degree of modesty inherent in ABS’ culture of sharing. Nonetheless, when pressed, Axel admits to taking some satisfaction in her organization’s accomplishments over the past 35 years. “Many accommodations and multi-sensory tools in arts and culture have become broadly established, and our community is uniting and gaining in presence and power. As you impact people with disabilities, you help shape the community that pushes cultural organizations, the City and other groups to move things forward, so that we never go back to just a touch closet.”

by Warren Shaw