Our Mission

Since 2013, the Vision & Art Project, an initiative of The American Macular Degeneration Foundation (AMDF), has given greater visibility to the overlooked influence of macular degeneration on historical and contemporary artists.

Macular degeneration affects one out of five artists today. Though it can be challenging to do so, many artists with macular degeneration continue to make art. This art plays a vital role in the tapestry of human creative output, enlarges our understanding of artists’ careers, and helps us to appreciate the complexities of what it means to see.

Through our diverse projects and initiatives, The Vision & Art Project aspires to:

• Make people aware of the prevalence of macular degeneration among artists—and, by extension, in the population at large.
• Show how artists have responded to macular degeneration.
• Destigmatize the notion of working within the constraints imposed by vision loss.
• Provide practical support to artists with macular degeneration.
• Make visible an invisible side of art history and open up new ways of looking at art and artists’ careers.
• Provide a contribution to research on vision loss from the perspective of the arts.
• Enlarge our understanding of what vision is.
• Make art accessible online to people with low vision by hand-crafting alt text, the written descriptions of visual imagery that is hidden in our html code and can be read by screen readers.