The Small Story

BOSTON—All around him, the museum is in motion, with people walking up to sculptures, and stepping back from them, and absorbing them from different angles. David Kingsbury, 53, holds his ground. He is standing in a hallway at the Museum of Fine Arts, facing a piece of stone he cannot see, waiting for the woman beside him to send some words his way.

This is the rhythm of their relationship:  She starts the story of what she sees, and he chimes in with any questions. And so she begins, shaping the piece of stone into a portrait, and placing a young boy inside. She chisels the child’s fine features, then moves over to his long flow of curls. 

“And there’s this little tuft of hair,” says Robin Ty, 30, a volunteer guide with the MFA. “Almost like a rooster’s, right at the top of his forehead.”

David considers this. 

“Reminds me of my first son,” he says.

This Saturday marks something of a milestone for David. He’s back where he began, with the work of Italian Renaissance sculptors, the first art he experienced in the MFA’s program for people who are blind or visually impaired. He was beginning a new life then. Nothing felt right.

It took time and practice to get here, as things do for David these days. But more than two years later, he is standing in a space he once thought was lost—one visitor among many, facing the work of an artist, feeling something stir in him again. 

Before and After

All the years he lived in Italy, David could see the beauty in art for himself. He savored it wherever he went—in the churches of small villages, in the vaulted rooms of the Vatican Museum. 

He lived there for nearly 10 years, an agricultural economist at the United Nations, traveling often to Africa, taking care of his three teenaged kids. Then, in 2004, came the accident he just doesn't talk about.

David could do a few things after it happened: Find his way around the apartment. Use the restroom. Use a cell phone. But nearly everything else, he had to relearn.

His power as a parent; his proficiency as a professional; all the knowledge he had gathered through the years, about how the world worked for him, and how he worked in the world— gone overnight, along with his sight.

“It was about as traumatic as something can be, when your life suddenly stops,” he said. 
 
A few months later, David went back to work, but he was too limited then, and might always be. In 2006, he moved back home to Massachusetts with his children, settling in Stoughton, near his brother. 

That year, David rarely left the house. What if he tripped, and fell, or bumped into something hard? It was not the physical pain he minded; it was the fumbling around in public.

‘The fear of the embarrassment,” he said.

But at some point, he had to push back; in 2007, he enrolled at the Carroll Center for the Blind in Newton. He learned how to use the white cane to get around, and how to manage his household without the help of others. He made a few friends. 

Then one day, six weeks in, David boarded the bus for the MFA.
 

Reaching Out

For three decades, the MFA has run a comprehensive program for people who are blind or visually impaired. Thirty-two trained guides. More than 370 visitors one recent year. It’s part of the museum’s larger mission to make art accessible to anyone with a disability, from deafness to Alzheimer’s disease.

For David, there is an ever-expanding supply of audio guides and tactile samples to choose from. But the “Feeling for Form” program is what resonates most—a personalized tour, one-on-one or in a group, led by one of the MFA’s trained guides. 

That's where he began, on that first group trip to the MFA. Looking back, it was probably too early to try. Someone gave him gloves, and guided him toward a sculpted form, and what David felt was pieces. Toes. Legs. Breasts. 

None of it made sense to a man who saw art for nearly 50 years, and now suddenly could not. 

“Almost like an insult,” he said.

For the next few months, David stayed away from the museum. But he moved himself forward in other ways. He learned to sail with friends from the Carroll Center. He taught computer at the Greater Boston Guild for the Blind. After three years of severe depression, he seemed to find some small peace.

So that sometime in early summer, when he heard the MFA was hosting an exhibit of Edward Hopper, one of his favorite painters, David was not just tempted to try again. He was ready.


Telling the Story of Art

David doesn’t know how they do it. It’s hard enough to give a tour to the average visitor—but to someone who’s blind?

“These people have got guts,” he says. 

The MFA gives its guides a format to follow, an ordered way to tell the story of art: 

Set the stage with basic facts, like the size of the frame. Fill in the frame with characters and colors and movement. Then end with interpretation—what experts have said about the piece, and its place in art history.


In the beginning, David let the guides' words wash over him. But it became clear to him soon enough. If he wanted a full picture, he had to participate. If he has questions, and he always does, he takes his guide where he wants her to go.

“Sorry,” he says to Robin this day, interrupting her description of a scene. “Is he staring at us, or…where’s he staring?”

“Are his legs at all bent, or are they ramrod straight?” 

“When you say straightforward, you mean that-a-way, right?” 

When it comes right down to it, David considers himself lucky. He came to blindness late. He knows what the world looks like; he can pull those memories up at any time. 

When Robin describes a glazed piece of pottery as blue and white, he knows enough about colors to ask:

“Milky white and sky blue?” 

“Well,” she says. “It’s more of a bright sky blue.”

“Must be a striking contrast to see,” he says. 


Coming into Community

At this point, there is no better or worse. Just different. Art was a solitary thing for David before the blindness. Now he is animated with the urge to discuss.

Why did Donatello make the angels’ faces look so old? Who do you think commissioned that portrait of the boy?  One day, he spent three hours discussing a painting with his friend Deanne, and their guide—back and forth on why the painter did what the guide said he did.

“Whether we’re right or wrong, it doesn’t really matter,” he says.

Art has now become an interactive activity. Standing with Deanne in a big hushed room, acting out a complicated "Christ with a cross" scene, trying to get a better sense of what's happening in the painting. Laughing, as the guide moves their arms in all kinds of contorted ways.

“We must have looked ridiculous to the sighted people,” David said, smiling.

But he no longer cares. 

He’s out of the house, and into the community, putting the larger “puzzle” of his new life together. He visits the MFA twice a month now. He’s started volunteering, helping staff with audio scripts, talking to groups of guides about what it’s like to see art through the eyes of others.

“It ain’t great being blind,” David says. “But I’ve met some fantastic people.”

As the Saturday session winds down, he stands with Robin facing a delicate Donatello relief. David listens, his head tilted, his hands settled at the top of his cane. Her storytelling voice is smooth, rising and falling as she stretches out the words. 

She is saying how the Christ child is cradled in a throne of his mother’s thighs. She is saying how fine and fragile the lines of his carvings look.

David frames a final question. 

“If you could guess,” he begins. “The deepest relief would be what fraction of an inch?”

Robin leans forward to look.

Less than a quarter, she tells him. David marvels at the answer he just got for himself. He will never make a complete replica in his mind. But he can still see beauty if he tries.