Blind Sculptors

Last week Portland, Ore. saw a sculpture show extraordinary. All 17 pieces of sculpture at the Portland Art Museum--a few animals but mostly heads and portrait busts of people--showed curious distortions, strangely lengthened necks, prominent ears and teeth, projecting lips, bulging shoulder blades, mouths agape. Though some of the eyes in these strange statues were small and some large, all were closed.

These sightless figures were made by sightless sculptors. They were children (average age: 13) from the Oregon State School for the Blind at nearby Salem. Once a week, instructed by 28-year-old Sculptor George Justin Blais. 16 students (eight boys, eight girls) gathered at the Federal Art Center to model in clay. Working from distant memories and oral descriptions, sometimes using their schoolmates for models, the blind children tried to make up in touch what they lack in sight. Instructor Blais suggested ideas (whiskered men, cowboys, animals, etc.), criticized results as work progressed, but permitted his pupils to do all their own modeling. The children learned to work very rapidly, often did a portrait head in an hour. One little girl, told that her statue's nose was wrong, pulled it off with one hand, with the other rolled a new nose and jammed it into place.

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Manhattan also had an exhibition of blind sculpture last week. Unlike Portland's blind sculptors, Manhattan's were adults: women from 19 to 71. At The Lighthouse, a comfortably proportioned, six-story building on 59th Street, the New York Association for the Blind provides education, recreation and work for sightless people, holds classes in sculpture with instructors borrowed from WPA.

Visitors at the Manhattan show were especially impressed with a bulgy plaster elephant done by 52-year-old Clara Crampton, who, blind from birth, had never seen one. Other Manhattan blind sculptors had made statues of an armchair, a cat, a fisherman, a violinist. One had even managed a mother and child. The Lighthouse had expected to put price tags on the works and raise a little extra cash for the artists by selling them. But the blind sculptors flatly objected. Not one was willing to part with her sculpture, at any price.

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