Art at the Peabody Essex Museum: Improving Accessibility for Color-blind Viewers
Art at the Peabody Essex Museum: Improving Accessibility for Color-blind Viewers
New Partnership with EnChroma
According to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, one in 12 men and one in 200 women are color-blind. And until now I never thought much about what that means when they walk into an art museum. Think of the colors of the Impressionists, the yellow sunflowers and cerulean sky of Van Gogh, the dramatic Caravaggio reds, not to mention every scrap in Bisa Butler’s quilt art. Now imagine those colors muted, or absent.
The Peabody Essex Museum is trying to make art more accessible to those who are color-blind. And if you are someone with the condition, you may be eligible to participate in a study. You’ll get a free pair of EnChroma specs. Here’s the story:
SALEM, MA – The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) is proud to launch a new partnership with EnChroma to help color-blind visitors experience the vibrancy of artworks in a new way. PEM will host a special event on Thursday, November 14 at 10 am to kick off the partnership and begin offering glasses with specially-engineered lenses to enhance visitors’ experience and advance the museum’s accessibility offerings.
EnChroma glasses, developed by a California-based company, enable users with color blindness to see an expanded range of colors more vividly and distinctly. The glasses offer an opportunity to experience colorful art, see the beauty of nature, overcome everyday challenges and better understand and appreciate colors.
“We are pleased to expand PEM’s accessibility efforts and include accommodations for visitors experiencing color blindness,” said Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, PEM’s Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Executive Director and CEO. “I can’t wait for our visitors to explore the museum and see PEM’s artworks in a new light: perceiving subtle details and experiencing the true impact of an artist’s color choices.”
According to the National Institutes of Health, about one in 12 people assigned male at birth (8%) and one in 200 people assigned female at birth (0.5%) are color blind – 350 million people in the world, and 13 million in the U.S. alone. People with fully functioning color vision see more than one million hues, but people with red-green color blindness (the most common type) only see an estimated 10% of visible colors. As a result, they perceive some colors as muddled, muted, washed out or indistinguishable. Purple may look blue, red seems brown, gray appears pink and green and yellow can look similar.
PEM joins the ranks of several prestigious cultural institutions that also offer EnChroma glasses to their visitors, including the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the RISD Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Call for Participants
PEM’s EnChroma launch will be held on Thursday, November 14 at 10 am. Those who experience color blindness are invited to participate in the event and a one-hour study. To be considered, interested visitors must fill out a brief form. Participants must be willing to speak with reporters about how colors appear with and without EnChroma glasses and describe their experience. Participants will receive a free pair of EnChroma glasses. EnChroma will contact those selected well in advance of the date to provide more details.
(Photo, top, E. Ambrose Webster, Webster House, Provincetown (detail), 1931. Oil on canvas. The Sheila W. and Samuel M. Robbins Collection. 2015.44.66. Peabody Essex Museum. Photo by Kathy Tarantola/PEM, and text beyond the first two paragraphs courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum. PEM is approximately 2 hours by car from the Upper Valley. If you’re in Boston for a weekend, it’s an easy day trip to Salem by commuter rail. PEM is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays but best always to check the website.)
Click here to read an earlier post about my trip to Salem and what, in addition to PEM, I found there.
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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.