Sculptures For The Blind

This project was made during Lenka Clayton's artist's residency at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, under the title Unanswered Letter. It was originally shown at the museum as part of the 2017 exhibition Lenka Clayton : Object Temporarily Removed. The exhibition was supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding was provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Arcadia Foundation. Major support of FWM is provided by the Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation. FWM receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Additional support is provided by the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, Agnes Gund, and the Board of Directors and Members of The Fabric Workshop and Museum. --Provided by Publisher.

"Makhi Xenakis has been sketching, sculpting and writing since childhood. Born in Paris, she studied architecture under Paul Virilio, then began creating theater sets and costumes, notably with Claude Regy. In 1987 she moved to New York City for two years and met Louise Bourgeois. It was a turning-point." "The French-language edition of this book, Louise Bourgeois: L'aveugle guidant l'oveugle, was published in 1998. In 1999 Makhj's sculptures went on show for the first time, and her book Parfois seule (Sometimes Alone) was published. After the death of her father, Iannis Xenakis, she wrote Laisser venit les Fantomes (Let the Ghosts Come). In 2004, doing research in the archives of the La Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, Makhi discovered the nightmarish lives of thousands of women who for centuries were locked in the old prison that once stood there. She wrote Les Folles d'Enfer de la Salpetriere (Madwomen of Hell: La Salpetriere), and exhibited two hundred and sixty sculptures in the chapel of the Salpetriere hospital." "Her drawings and sculptures are in numerous public collections, including the Centre Pompidou, the Fonds National de l'Art Contemporain, the Bibliotheque National de France, the Manufacture Nationale de Sevres and the Fonds Municipal d'Art Contemporain de la Ville de Paris."--BOOK JACKET.

The blind photographer cannot see a butterfly perched perfectly still on a flower, a bowl of sweet-smelling fruit, or a child's rattle on a darkened floor, but the mind's eye is sharply focused. How then, do blind or partially sighted people capture such extraordinary images? The photographs in this revelatory book suggest a deeper truth: that blindness is itself a kind of seeing, and that those who can see are often blind to the strangeness and beauty of the world around them. As the blind photographer Evgen Bavcar writes, "Photography must belong to the blind, who in their daily existence have learned to become the masters of camera obscura." Through the photographs of more than fifty blind or partially sighted people from around the world, this exhilarating book—the first to explore this phenomenon in all its vibrancy and diversity—will make you see differently.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, the greatest French writers and artists became embroiled in a debate that turned on the priority of painting or sculpture, touch or sight, color or design, ancients or moderns. Jacqueline Lichtenstein guides readers through these historic quarrels, decoding the key terms of the heated discussions and revealing how the players were influenced by the concurrent explosion of scientific discoveries concerning the senses of sight and touch. Drawing on the work of René Descartes, Roger de Piles, Denis Diderot, Charles Baudelaire, and Émile Zola, among others, The Blind Spot lets readers eavesdrop on an energetic and contentious conversation that preoccupied French intellectuals for three hundred years.