See Braille street art in its unnatural environment — a gallery
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Back in August we wrote about Braille street art, the product of a special partnership between Austin Seraphin, a blind person, and Sonia Petruse, a sighted person. Together, they've written messages in both print and Braille on Priority Mail stickers and plastered them around the city.
Starting tonight, their work will be on display as part of Yell Gallery's group exhibition on cartography. (Pieces by Emily E. Erb, Joel Chartkoff, Alina Josan, Sarah Kelley, Nilé Livingston, Dan Shurley and Shawn Thornton will also be featured).
Mukethe Kawinzi, Yell Gallery's curator and founding director, had this to say:
The stickers are included as part of Inclusion/Exclusion: The Poetics of Cartography; the exhibition is exploring the ways in which we see, interpret, mark, and explore our spaces. I love the Braille Street Art project and chose to include the stickers in appreciation of the dimensionality they add to navigating the streets of Philadelphia. #BrailleStreetArt--like all of the street art in our city--is a way of mapping, a means of impressing guideposts throughout the city. I find them beautiful and political, which I hope all of the work in the show can be seen as.
