In art class yesterday, Terrell McCorkle worked diligently fashioning clay into the shape of a fruit bowl, a banana and grapes.

His hands worked quickly, kneading the dough-like glob into familiar fruit shapes as his friends and classmates around him did the same.

"I'm going to make a burger," said one.

	John Beale, Post-Gazette Jamie Garner, a student at Western Pennsylvania School for Blind Children in Oakland, gets help from teacher Mary Stauffer as she colors an apple she molded from clay during an art for the blind program being put on by Pittsburgh artist Robert Qualters. Click photo for larger image.

It mattered not what they sculpted, just that they were having the experience, one being shared by thousands of people around the world through Oct. 25.

Unlike other art students, McCorkle, 18, of Wilkinsburg, and his classmates are blind. They are enrolled at Western Pennsylvania School for Blind Children in Oakland, which is participating in an international effort called Art Beyond Sight, which grew from 30 organizations last year to 70 this year.

The project encourages museums, cultural arts groups and schools to host programs for the blind or those who have only partial sight. The events range from special touch tours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to a backstage tour and audio description of the Denver Ballet's production of "Dracula."

In Pittsburgh, the event at the School for the Blind was an art class with award-winning local sculptor Robert Qualters.

"The project shakes up everyone's understanding of blindness or visual impairment," said Nina Levent, associate director for the nonprofit Art Education for the Blind based in New York City, which started Art Beyond Sight last year.

"Some people still think blindness and the visual arts are an unlikely match. They think it's a joke. It isn't. Creativity doesn't end when you lose your sight," she said.

"There has been enough research to show blind people can understand visual concepts," Levent said.

As part of the project, a daylong conference call on Monday will bring together experts from various fields to talk about ways of making art more accessible to the blind.

Museums, for example, can provide reproductions or models that blind people can touch, host verbal description tours, or even have actors re-enact a painting.

"Touch operates the way sight does. Whatever they touch they'll form an image of," Levent said.

Art Education for the Blind was founded in 1987 by a Harvard graduate student Elizabeth Salzhauer Axel, whose grandmother was losing her sight.

One of the group's key efforts also has been to produce a six-volume set about art history that includes raised text and images. The series covers basic art and includes volumes on modern European, Baroque, ancient Greek, and ancient Egyptian art, and arts of Africa and the Americas.