OTHER VIEWS / OTRAS MIRADAS

Art Beyond Sight

Other Views (Otras Miradas) is an inclusive and multidisciplinary art project created by Cuban-born artist Arlet Gomez to explore how visual art can be created and experienced beyond sight.

Developed in Cuba in 2010, the project brings together painting, touch, Braille, poetry, music, and performance, placing blind participants not only in the role of audience members, but also as artists, creators, and active voices within the experience.

During the early exhibitions in Cuba, blind participants sang and recited poetry alongside the tactile artworks, transforming the exhibition space into an encounter between different forms of perception and artistic expression.

DACTIL-ART

At the heart of Other Views is Dactil-Art, a system developed by Arlet Gomez for teaching pictorial art to blind and visually impaired people and patented in Spain.

Dactil-Art explores the possibilities of creating images through touch. Instead of relying primarily on vision, participants use tactile processes to understand form, composition, line, texture, and spatial relationships, translating these elements into their own artistic creations.

The system challenges the conventional idea that pictorial art belongs exclusively to the visual realm. Through Dactil-Art, a person who cannot see a painting can become an active image-maker, developing a visual language through touch, memory, imagination, and sensory experience.

Dactil-Art became an essential component of Other Views and its broader mission: not simply making art accessible to blind people, but creating ways for blind people to make art themselves.


THE EXHIBITIONS

The project has been presented through three exhibitions in Cuba and Spain:

Proverbs — 2010
Villa Clara, Cuba

Sea the Light — 2011
Havana, Cuba

Other Views — 2013
Barcelona, Spain

Across these exhibitions, tactile artworks, Braille, poetry, music, performance, and Dactil-Art came together to question what it means to “see” an artwork.

FULL CIRCLE — 2026

Sixteen years after the first Other Views exhibition, the project enters a new chapter through Full Circle, Arlet Gomez’s solo exhibition at the Gallery at Lake Park Public Library in Palm Beach County, Florida.

Full Circle reconnects with the original ideas behind Other Views through a dialogue between painting, poetry, Braille, literature, and touch. Inspired by the poetry of Denise Marsh, passages from Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, and other literary voices, Gomez embeds language in Braille directly into the surfaces of her paintings.

Visitors are invited to move beyond looking. Selected works can be touched, allowing words, textures, and images to be encountered through different forms of perception.

From Cuba to Spain and now Palm Beach County, Other Views continues to evolve while preserving the question that has guided the project from the beginning:

What happens to visual art when seeing is no longer the only way to experience it?