When Daniel Solomon first arrived at Brown University, he noticed students had few opportunities on campus to interact with blind or visually impaired people. The junior from Miami, who was born with ocular albinism and is legally blind, knew public education would be important to helping his classmates get a different perspective.
“To be at a place like Brown with a severe visual impairment, it’s not something that you see every day,” he says. “A lot of the time for our peers, we are the first blind or visually impaired students that they meet.”
Today, Solomon is the director of “The Blind Urban Subject,” an interactive art installation on the corner of Thayer and Angell streets. The project allows passersby — both students and members of the public — to experience urban life through the lens of four common eye conditions.
Solomon’s Brown advocacy started in 2022, when he and classmate Rishika Kartik founded Blind at Brown. Though not born blind, Kartik had advocated for the blind community since her freshman year of high school, when her best friend lost her vision, and previously volunteered leading art activities for blind and low-vision students in her home state of Colorado. Along with a faculty advisor, Solomon and Kartik developed a course, “Blindness, Arts and Media,” that enrolled thirty students the following spring.
One of the students in that course, Zoe Goldemberg, proved the perfect partner to bring their latest project to life. A Brown/RISD dual degree student studying materials engineering and apparel design, Goldemberg assembled a team of students — including Gresh Chapman, Hudson Hale and Yutaka Tomokiyo — to build out the installation.
The group leased a binocular tower viewer from Tower Optical Co. in Connecticut and set about creating different settings. The tower viewer is similar to those seen at tourist attractions where passersby can peer through eyeholes for a closer look. In this case, instead of looking at scenery, users see a busy campus intersection. A knob on the viewer allows users to toggle between four common eye conditions — cataracts, glaucoma, macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy. Each one has a different lens that affects how users see the scene.
“There’s a really big misconception about blindness, and that is that it’s like a light switch. Blindness is either fully blind, or you’re fully sighted,” Solomon explains. “When people look at me, they don’t usually think that I’m blind or visually impaired. My response is, ‘What does a blind person look like?’”
In his case, legally blind means that he is sensitive to light, lacks depth perception and has rapid, involuntary eye movements. For others, it could mean vision loss, dark spots or trouble seeing at night.
“Explaining to people my condition, people are surprised that blindness is so nuanced,” he says.
For Kartik, the project offers an opportunity to see the world through another’s eyes.

“Being able to literally see what your loved one or your friend or your partner or whoever sees, and how they experience the world, is very powerful,” she says.
The installation formally opened in November and featured a ribbon cutting attended by Providence Mayor Brett Smiley and Grace Pires, president of the Rhode Island chapter of the National Federation for the Blind, among other local and state officials. Solomon, Kartik and Goldemberg hope the project continues to bring awareness to the experience of blind and visually impaired people in urban settings. They plan to launch a research project analyzing the public perception of blind and visually impaired people through public art. Solomon, an Urban Studies concentrator, says policymakers are often confused how to make cities accessible for blind people.
“In my experience, the art of building better cities for the blind is the art of building better cities,” he says.
Though Providence still has progress to be made around accessibility, he rates his experience here better than in New York City, where he lived over the summer. New York, he notes, was not designed for pedestrians, making it particularly challenging for blind pedestrians to navigate.
“Ultimately that’s what I think we’re doing with our exhibit, is trying to get more sighted people to care about the blind experience,” Kartik adds.
The installation is permitted to remain at the intersection until Feb. 1, though Solomon and Kartik say they hope to extend its reach beyond campus. Passersby can learn more about the installation through informational decals on the sidewalk and by visiting blindurbansubject.org.
This story ran originally in RI Monthly on December 3, 2024.
Copyright permission granted Rhode Island Monthly Communications 2024.
Lauren Clem, Rhode Island Monthly Associate Editor,contributes in-depth features to the magazine and blogs about trending events and happenings. A former news writer, she especially enjoys covering the state’s bustling brewery scene and reporting on the environment and the outdoors.