[accessibleimage] 5 Blind Jurors Judge Sculptures; Fingers Pick 6 Winners From 100

5 Blind Jurors Judge Sculptures; Fingers Pick 6 Winners From 100

THE NEW YORK TIMES, May 8, 1951, P. 33

A five-member jury of the blind was called upon yesterday to judge 100
sculptures in the art show, sponsored by Artists Equity Association and the
New York Association for the Blind, that opens today in the Lighthouse, 111
East Fifty-ninth Street.

The assignment for the Jury members--four women and one man--was almost "too
much responsibility," one said. Rocky, the handsome seeing-eye companion to
Catherine Cohen, one of the jurors, kept dignified pace with her art
reviewer as she made her way through the forest of carvings and castings
"seeing" them with sensitive fingers.

The show has 500 paintings. It stretches the equivalent of several blocks
along corridors of the recently enlarged and reconstructed Lighthouse, in
the auditorium and in adjacent rooms.

The work of New York State artists, it is Equity's first show by its
members. A benefit for the Lighthouse, which is functioning for the first
time as an art gallery, the event will aid the organization through the $6
admission charge today and the following 60 cent admissions through May 26
when the show ends, and through the sale of paintings and sculptures.

A prize of a three-week one-man show to an artist without gallery
representation, donated by the Argent Gallery of New York, was won by Mary
Steele for her abstract "Painting." The selection was made by the gallery.

The sculpture jury had a difficult decision to make, not only for the top
prize of $100, donated by Emanuel Romano, painter and chairman of the
exhibition, in memory of his sculptor father, but also for six honorable
mentions. The money prize was awarded to Jane Wasey, a Chicago-born New York
sculptor, for her ebony carving of a musician with his 'cello, "Dark Note."
The honorable mentions went to Genevieve Karr Hamlin, Cleo Hartwig, Joseph
Hovell, Kermah Kallman, Oronzio Maldarelli and Bernard Simon.

Miss Cohen, who is noted at the Lighthouse for her pottery, earns her
livelihood as a proofreader for books in Braille. The other jurors were Anna
Walsh, head of the Women's Club at the Lighthouse and an actress there;
Teddy Marcone, Lighthouse crafts instructor, and Sarah Asch and Haiganoush
Tashjian. They found the abstract sculptures the hardest to make out.

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