When was the last time you went to a museum and were encouraged to experience art with your hands, not your eyes?
For the exhibition Ay-Ō’s Happy Rainbow Hell, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art (NMAA) included “haptic boxes” that use ultrasonic vibrations to emulate physical sensations. While not actually touching anything, a visitor can reach inside a box to feel a light prick of pins and needles or a ping pong ball rolling against their palm.
Japanese Fluxus artist and print designer Ay-Ō, now 92 years old, believes strongly in the sensory possibilities of the print medium. He aims to “make light a concrete, tactile experience,” says exhibition curator Kit Brooks. In addition to his technically elaborate, prismatic rainbow silkscreen prints, he produced dozens of “Finger Boxes” in the 1960s with contents that could not be seen, only touched.
One of his works, Tactile List, catalogs 40 different textural objects like “sand” and “rubber,” so when NMAA partnered with ARTECHOUSE to pick two examples from the list to inspire the haptic boxes, they selected “pin” and “ping pong ball.”
According to Brooks, the idea of using touchless haptic technology was propelled by concerns about COVID-19 and the looming question of possible infection from touching surfaces. This is the museum’s first time presenting this type of technology and the public has responded with wonder and delight. One visitor with hearing aids told NMAA they could even “hear” vibrations inside the haptic boxes.
“We wanted to engage visitors beyond traditional modes, such as sight, for experiencing art,” says Brooks. “It has been so rewarding to witness the range of emotions across visitors’ faces as they engage with the interactive elements of the exhibition. We hope they leave with a heightened sense of curiosity and see Ay-Ō’s prints as more than just two-dimensional compositions.”
Complementing the display of Ay-Ō’s vibrant, rainbow-hued prints is a visual study of his print Cat Nap illustrating how people with color blindness detect the wavelengths of the colors blue, green, and red. The study offers a glimpse at how those with color deficiency might perceive Ay-Ō’s work and help those will full-color vision appreciate colors they can see more deeply.
Ay-Ō’s Happy Rainbow Hell is the first solo show in the U.S. dedicated to the artist’s work and is accompanied by the first catalogue on the artist for an English-speaking audience. The exhibition is one of nearly 70 curatorial projects across the globe supported by Getty through the Paper Project, an initiative that aims to bring visibility to understudied prints and drawings collections for today’s museum audiences. The Paper Project has devoted $7.5 million to projects since its inception in 2018 and has led to groundbreaking research discoveries about works on paper.
Birdsongs at the British Library
Across the pond, the British Library is using a Paper Project grant to tap into another one of the five senses—hearing—by exploring the interconnections between historical prints and drawings and the modern technology of sound recording. The institution holds over 300,000 wildlife and environmental sounds in its collection, and its current exhibition, Animals: Art, Science and Sound, juxtaposes works on paper with dozens of recordings from nature, including the mournful song of the last living Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird. Sounds are presented through ceiling speakers, tablet screens, and ear cups.
Featuring many works that have never been displayed, the exhibition was formed from the British Library's international collection of prints and drawings, along with manuscripts, books, artefacts, and more. It explores the ways cultures around the world have written about, visualized, and recorded living creatures from the 2nd century to the present. To de-emphasize Western perspectives and promote a more global story, the exhibition presents several animal representations from outside Europe and Northern America, such as Middle Eastern manuscripts.
The exhibition is divided into four thematic sections where visitors can see and hear nature from around the world. “Darkness” includes bat echolocation and mating calls; “Water” features a mixture of underwater sounds from bottlenose dolphin echolocation to the mating calls of walruses; “Land” presents a varied grouping of sounds from gorillas beating their chests to the vibration of cicadas; and “Air” dives into the history of the voices of birds. Examples of human-produced sounds influenced by nature are also on display, such as French composer Olivier Messiaen’s piano solo Le Courlis Cendré which mimics a 1937 field recording of a curlew, a shorebird distinguished by a long, curved beak.
“By presenting written and visual works with sound recordings, we hope the exhibition demonstrates how integral sound is to understand the complex lives of thousands of species,” says Cheryl Tipp, wildlife and environmental sounds curator at the British Library. “Sound recordings have allowed us to reclassify species and locate previously unknown populations. Moving forward, they can help us try to protect those animals that are currently under threat.”
In addition to physical exhibitions, Getty’s Paper Project has supported dozens of digital projects, publications, and more. Just recently, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery used a Paper Project grant to uncover the identity of thousands of individuals from William Bache’s arsenic-laced silhouettes album which the curator fully digitized for a new website.
The National Gallery of Slovenia also recently used a Paper Project grant to create the first English-language digital project about Hinko Smrekar, a Slovenian illustrator and satirist who was imprisoned and executed for his political work during World War II.
“Our goal for the Paper Project initiative has always been to foster curatorial innovation, whether it’s through a physical exhibition, a digital project, a new publication, or professional workshops,” says Heather MacDonald, senior program officer at the Getty Foundation. “It is immensely rewarding to witness such creative projects come to fruition that showcase understudied works on paper in fresh ways.”
