Perkins Students Display their Works at the MFA

For Immediate Release
October 17, 2007 

Watertown, MA – From October 18 through November 26, art works created by students at Perkins School for the Blind, will be exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Perkins School art teacher Terri Werner and her students have been working with the Museum of Fine Arts for years.

Over the past year, students visited the museum several times to work with guides from "A Feeling for Form," a program in which participants with visual impairments are allowed to touch certain objects and access others through description and tactile objects. Back at school, the students created artworks based on what they learned at the MFA. Now, Werner and the MFA have collaborated to mount an exhibit of the students' art.

Fifteen secondary school students did paintings, created sculptures and constructed masks and reliefs. Werner, working with Hannah Goodwin of the MFA, helped the students create an exhibit complete with audio accounts of what inspired them. The program has had a powerful impact on the students. One student says of his visits, "They do change the way I look at art. Before I went to the MFA, art was just something to do, but [now] it's really something I like to do. Making things is kind of relaxing; it's really peaceful…"

Learn more about the Seeing What I Feel program and listen to the students speak about their work.