Ackland offers glasses for colorblind visitors
The art museum is the first in the state to provide a tool to help them see more hues.
The Ackland Art Museum is the first art museum in North Carolina to offer EnChroma glasses for color blind visitors. The glasses filter light to increase contrast between red and green color signals, helping those who are red-green colorblind to see a wider range of colors.
Lillian Rodriguez, the Ackland’s learning resources coordinator, hopes that offering the glasses will allow visitors with colorblindness to experience art in a new way. Visitors may reserve EnChroma glasses online for a two-hour window.
“Our goal with the glasses is to make the Ackland more accessible to everyone,” Rodriguez said.
The Ackland hosted an Aug. 21 event to debut the glasses. Six individuals were given a pair of the EnChroma glasses before gathering to view a colorful, geometric painting titled “Arranged” by Peter Halley. After a few moments of looking at the piece without the glasses, Rodriguez asked everyone to try on the glasses at the same time. For some of the participants, the effect was immediate.
(Andrew Lam/UNC-Chapel Hill)
“It’s like everything became in focus,” said assistant professor Sherrill Roland of the UNC College of Arts and Sciences’ art and art history department, whose installation “Processing Systems: Bonding by Sherrill Roland” is on view at the Ackland. “Somehow, my vision was flattening colors. Dulling them.”
Others, like Durham-based physician Dr. Scott Robert, were focused not only on the artwork but also on their broader surroundings.
“The walls of the gallery initially looked almost green,” Robert said. “But when I put the glasses on, they look somewhere even closer to gray or even purple.”
Other participants included middle schooler Ryan Hudson, alongside his mom, Delia Hudson, a speech-language pathologist. He hopes he can wear EnChroma glasses while playing soccer and basketball at school, where he often struggles to differentiate the teams’ jerseys due to his colorblindness.
(Andrew Lam/UNC-Chapel Hill)
Before leaving the event, Roland was able to see his piece “Processing Systems” the way most Ackland visitors will. Roland says he was surprised by how the glasses revealed the piece, with its large-scale, complex grid structure and different colored numbers arrayed across the gallery wall. He is excited to experience looking at other artworks with the assistive EnChroma glasses.
“The closer you can get to the artist’s true intention of their work, the more you can connect that artist with the public,” Roland said. “These glasses will definitely change how I interpret works now that I can read them in a different way.”
