What Was Once Familiar: The Vision & Art Project's Tenth Anniversary Benefit Exhibition

In celebration of The Vision & Art Project’s 10th anniversary, a special benefit exhibition will be held at the National Arts Club in New York. What Was Once Familiar: The Vision & Art Project's Tenth Anniversary Benefit Exhibition will be on view from March 20 until April 26, 2024.

This exhibition brings together 52 works by artists who have experienced macular degeneration, a common disease of the retina that results in central vision loss. The artists included are: Lennart Anderson (1928–2015), Robert Birmelin (1933–), Serge Hollerbach (1923–2021), Dahlov Ipcar (1917–2017), Robert Andrew Parker (1927–2023), Phillip Perkis (1935–), Tim Prentice (1930–), Thomas Sgouros (1927–2012), Hedda Sterne (1910–2011), William Thon (1906–2000) and Erika Marie York (1990–). Spanning from 1965–2021, these works range in genre, including figurative, abstract, still life, portraiture, and landscape. Various media are represented, including oil, watercolor, charcoal, photography, mixed media, and sculpture. Viewed together, the collection explores the breadth of the work undertaken by artists who experience vision loss. The curation encourages the consideration of art created pre- and post-macular degeneration, revealing the myriad ways that the artists’ practices transform over time. For example, they altered their approaches, varying their techniques and the media they employed. The exhibition maps how artists’ changing visions shape their experiences of the world, and how this translates into the evolution of their visual expressions.

What Was Once Familiar—and the Vision & Art Project more broadly—focuses on the under-discussed issue of vision loss in artists. Macular degeneration is very common—around three in ten people over the age of 65 will experience the condition. However, the focus of this exhibition is not only on the works created by artists once they are affected by vision loss. Instead, the Vision & Art Project brings together art made throughout the careers of these artists, emphasizing the evolution of their practice over time. Its aim is to combine art history, research, education, and advocacy.