STATEHOUSE CALENDAR

A model building will be displayed at the Ohio Statehouse that was used at the Ohio State School for the Blind.  The Statehouse model was created by the WPA to give students who are blind the chance to physically experience historic buildings, objects, and concepts.  

Opened in 1837 with one teacher and five students, The Ohio State School for the Blind was the first public blind school in the United States.  Originally located in a rented building in downtown Columbus, it found a permanent home at the corner of Parsons Avenue and Main Street in 1839. The school occupied this site for over a hundred years before finally moving in the 1950s to its present location on High Street just south of Worthington.

Through a TeachArts Ohio grant from the Ohio Arts Council, OSSB was able to work with Columbus artist, Claudia Retter, on creating a documentary timeline of the school’s history. Students researched and chose key events, including not only those pertaining directly to the school itself, but also others that affected the blind community as a whole. 

The choice was made to present the timeline as a series of banners with both visual and braille components. While it would have been easy to print images directly to fabric with iron-on paper, students preferred the more tactile feel of acrylic image transfer. In this process, gel medium is brushed onto the surface of a color photocopy, then placed face down on fabric.  When dry, pigments remain adhered to the clear acrylic while the paper backing is dampened with water and peeled off.  The resulting image is never perfect, leaving gaps and scratches that can be left as-is or reworked with various color media. 

One of the timeline banners depicts wooden scale models created by Work Projects Administration craftsmen during the Roosevelt era, and the model of the Ohio Statehouse is displayed as part of this exhibition.  The WPA models were constructed at OSSB to give blind students the chance to physically experience historic buildings, objects, and concepts.  Once considered the world’s largest collection of tactile teaching aids, they are historically significant not only to the school and to the blind community, but to the State of Ohio and America itself.   

Under the generous guidance of Columbus art restorer, David Terry, OSSB is undertaking the major project of cleaning and restoring their collection of WPA models for future exhibitions and display. It is one of the intentions of this exhibit to raise awareness of this national treasure.