DO NOT TOUCH.(The Talk of the Town)

Before Nuria Chang went blind, at the age of eight, she had wanted to be an artist. When she was one, she could draw a human figure; at four, she was using perspective to sketch her bedroom. Still, by the time she lost her eyesight she had never really seen any art, so she grew up with no sense of what it was supposed to look like. (She is from Ecuador, and moved to New York in 1963.) That changed around fifteen years ago, when a ceramics instructor escorted her to the Museum of Modern Art, stood her in front of a sculpture, and encouraged her to touch it. In violation of the museum's rules, she reached out and felt what seemed to be a leg. This was a human figure, apparently. She felt some more, then exclaimed, "Oh, it's a naked man!"

Since then, Chang has become a MOMA regular. She often visits under the auspices of a museum program for people who are sight-impaired. A lecturer leads them through the galleries, describes paintings to them, and encourages them to touch a few sculptures. There have been no mishaps, although there was one session, in the sculpture garden, when a visitor's Seeing Eye dog relieved itself.

Chang is now a sculptor, but at MOMA she has come to favor the paintings of Picasso. "If I could see, I'd be painting something similar," she said. "I still think in color. When a person talks to me, I visualize his face, and as he pronounces words I imagine his lips."

One morning earlier this month, Chang and six others who were either blind or partially blind gathered on the fifth floor of the museum. Along with their lecturer, Amir Parsa, a poet and a writer, they had the galleries to themselves. They gathered around a Seurat--"Port-en-Bessin" (1888)--and Parsa began to describe it, in a didactic and modulating tone: "The very bottom third is what you might think of as land; a body of water occupies the upper two-thirds. That bottom third is a greenish earth-color tone that suggests this landmass to us, and above that we have bluish hues that determine this watery body. You really have a lot of horizontals." It was hard to see it, if you couldn't see it, but the visitors were rapt, re-creating Seurat on the gallery walls of their minds. "He actually uses only dots, small dots," Parsa went on. "He uses the very tip of the brush to create what we just described as a scene, and he does not mix colors, meaning that these small dots, juxtaposed with each other, in a complementary manner, create this effect."

"Excuse me," Chang said. "So when the artist wants to create different shades of color he will use primary colors and mix those dots so that from far away it will look like ...