Enchroma glasses to be offered to visitors beginning Thursday, November 14 with an enchroma kick-off event at 10 am

SALEM, MA – The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) is proud to launch a new partnership with EnChroma to help color-blind visitors experience the vibrancy of artworks in a new way. PEM will host a special event on Thursday, November 14 at 10 am to kick off the partnership and begin offering glasses with specially-engineered lenses to enhance visitors’ experience and advance the museum’s accessibility offerings.

EnChroma glasses, developed by a California-based company, enable users with color blindness to see an expanded range of colors more vividly and distinctly. The glasses offer an opportunity to experience colorful art, see the beauty of nature, overcome everyday challenges and better understand and appreciate colors.

“We are pleased to expand PEM’s accessibility efforts and include accommodations for visitors experiencing color blindness,” said Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, PEM’s Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Executive Director and CEO. “I can’t wait for our visitors to explore the museum and see PEM’s artworks in a new light: perceiving subtle details and experiencing the true impact of an artist’s color choices.”

According to the National Institutes of Health, about one in 12 people assigned male at birth (8%) and one in 200 people assigned female at birth (0.5%) are color blind – 350 million people in the world, and 13 million in the U.S. alone. People with fully functioning color vision see more than one million hues, but people with red-green color blindness (the most common type) only see an estimated 10% of visible colors. As a result, they perceive some colors as muddled, muted, washed out or indistinguishable. Purple may look blue, red seems brown, gray appears pink and green and yellow can look similar.

PEM joins the ranks of several prestigious cultural institutions that also offer EnChroma glasses to their visitors, including the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the RISD Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS
PEM’s EnChroma launch will be held on Thursday, November 14 at 10 am. Those who experience color blindness are invited to participate in the event and a one-hour study. To be considered, interested visitors must fill out a brief form. Participants must be willing to speak with reporters about how colors appear with and without EnChroma glasses and describe their experience. Participants will receive a free pair of EnChroma glasses. EnChroma will contact those selected well in advance of the date to provide more details.

Image Credits

• E. Ambrose Webster, Webster House, Provincetown (detail), 1931. Oil on canvas. The Sheila W. and Samuel M. Robbins Collection. 2015.44.66. Peabody Essex Museum. Photo by Kathy Tarantola/PEM.
• Additional publicity images available upon request.

ABOUT ENCHROMA
EnChroma is a California-based company that uses a lens technology developed at the University of California, Berkeley. A study by the University of California, Davis, and France’s INSERM Stem Cell and Brain Research Institute, demonstrated the effectiveness of EnChroma glasses. A separate study, published in 2022 in the scientific publication Eye-Nature, also highlights the benefits of the glasses for people with color vision deficiencies.

About the Peabody Essex Museum
Founded in 1799, the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts, is the country’s oldest continuously operating museum. PEM provides thought-provoking experiences of the arts, humanities, and sciences to celebrate the creative achievements and potential of people across time, place and culture. By connecting people through inquiry, empathy and dialogue, PEM encourages an understanding of our shared humanity and fosters a sense of belonging in a complex, ever-changing world. We build, steward and share our superlative collection, which includes African, American, Asian Export, Chinese, contemporary, Japanese, Korean, maritime, Native American, Oceanic and South Asian art, as well as architecture, fashion and textiles, photography, natural history and one of the nation’s most important museum-based collections of rare books and manuscripts. PEM offers a varied and unique visitor experience, with hands-on creativity zones, interactive opportunities and performance spaces. The museum’s campus, which offers numerous gardens and green spaces, is an accredited arboretum and features more than a dozen noted historic structures, including Yin Yu Tang, a 200-year-old Chinese home that is the only example of Chinese domestic architecture in the United States.

MEDIA CONTACT
Whitney Van Dyke | Director of Marketing & Communications | whitney_vandyke@pem.org | 978-542-1828