![Picture shows the gallery, including four of Jaynes’s seven installations on view. In the center foreground is Jaynes’s Gift#1 on display on a flat, horizontally-angled rectangular table with a dark wood base. A white and brown paper owl rests on a cylindrical stand to the left of a large open book under a rectangular, clear acrylic hood. To the right of the display with the owl stands Jayne’s Gift #5, a map representation of the travels the 19th–century blind surveyor John Metcalf. It is a vertically-positioned, large rectangular table composed of a a linen top and a light brown wood base. A multi-color grid, outlines of geometric shapes, and green porcelain geometric shapes adorn the linen top. In the center background, on the back wall painted off-white, is Jayne’s Gift #4, a visual transmutation after the musical work of blind African American musician Thomas Wiggins. It is three horizontal and three vertical rows of prints in a geometric interplay of greens, browns and yellows. To the right of the prints on the wall is a small wooden frame in which brass musical notes are displayed. To the far right background is a view of Jaynes’s Gift #6, the scent mechanism the olfactometer, in a niche in an off-white curved wall. The floor of the room is covered with a tan colored carpet. [end of description]](https://commontouch.librarycompany.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/mckinnis-galleryshot-1030x688.jpg "Common Touch exhibition, looking southeast, in the main gallery of the Library Company, 2016.")
Common Touch: The Art of the Senses in the History of the Blind Comes to a Close
Erika Piola
Project Director, Common Touch
Over five years in the making, Common Touch: The Art of the Senses in the History of the Blind closed last month. After opening in April, over 2800 visitors attended the multi-sensory exhibition curated by artist-in-residence Teresa Jaynes. Exploring the history of the blind during the 19th century and the nature of perception, the project drew some of our most diverse audiences. Common Touch immersed high-school students, disability studies scholars, artists, and groups from the Associated Services for the Blind and Visually Impaired into a space in which history and new forms of tactile expression harmoniously intersected.
Profiled and praised on artblog, the Broad Street Review, and WHYY TV’s Friday Arts, the innovative exhibition produced by the Library Company’s Visual Culture Program (VCP at LCP) invited visitors to challenge their understanding of what it means to see and perceive. And in turn, they were to touch, hear, and breathe in the lives of a 19th-century blind artisan, musician, mathematician, as well as 18th-century surveyor. Jaynes’s art works that included tactile sculptural letters, geometric forms, an embroidered map, and embossed artist’s book evoked awe, contemplation, and a new understanding of our printing for the blind collections that inspired and accompanied them.
Created in partnership with Art-Reach, Institute on Disabilities at Temple University, Philly Touch Tours, and Jaynes’s Vision Council of advisors, Common Touch also represents our ongoing efforts to make the Library Company accessible. Labels printed in Braille, an audio tour scripted with verbal description, and a project website designed with tools to enhance the experience of those who are visually impaired were essential elements in the creation of and outreach for the exhibition.
Equally essential for our outreach was the rich slate of Common Touch programs. The events, rooted in aspects of the overall exhibition theme of the interrelationship between art, disability, and history, were often arranged in collaboration with peer institutions. In April an eager crowd at the Gershman Y experienced the award-winning performer, writer, and director Terry Galloway perform her one-woman play, You Are My Sunshine, about her cochlear implant. In May acclaimed scholar and author on disability Stephen Kuusisto talked to an equally rapt audience about the history of the blind, art, and his experience with the exhibition as someone who is visually impaired. And in September world-renowned master percussionist Pablo Batista and his Latin Jazz Ensemble enthralled over 100 attendees at a jazz concert co-sponsored by the Library Company, Philadelphia Jazz Project, and Free Library of Philadelphia.
Although the exhibition has ended, the accompanying catalog allows the Visual Culture Program project to live on. Designed with different textures of paper and an insert bookmark printed only in Braille, the catalog documents visitors’ experience with Common Touch, the dialogue it evoked, and the collaborations formed to create an exhibition where sight did not predominate. Through Common Touch, the Library Company continued its premier role as a research library at the forefront of creating new ways for our patrons to learn about and touch the history of our collections.
![Photo shows a large group of individuals gathered in front of Teresa Jaynes’s Gift #4 of nine green, yellow, and brown screen prints. The screen prints depict grid patterns. In the right of the image, a young woman attired in black pants and a short-sleeved teal blouse with a flower pattern on the edge, slightly hunches over as if listening to something. Her right hand is to her ear and her left hand holds a large envelope to her waist. To her left, are two women. They lean and bend over in listening stances. In the left of the image, is a group of men and women in summer clothes. They look toward the women standing in front of the screen prints. The screen prints are hung above a short white-colored floor riser. [end of description]](https://commontouch.librarycompany.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Photo-Aug-18-12-08-59-PM-2-80x80.jpg)