About Us

Pure Vision Arts (PVA) was founded in 2002 by The Shield Institute a not-for-profit human-service agency that educates and supports New Yorkers with autism and other developmental disabilities.

Pure Vision Arts is New York’s first specialized art studio and exhibition space for people with developmental disabilities. PVA is staffed by trained professionals with backgrounds in art education, fine arts, and art therapy who provide mentoring and support to the artists who attend the studio.

Pure Vision Arts is ultimately about facilitating social change by creating opportunities for access and inclusion in the arts for people with neurological challenges. Many PVA artists have led extraordinary lives and the sheer power and uniqueness of their work helps to break down negative public misperceptions and stereotypes about people who have disabilities. In a very short time, PVA has become a vital resource for new and emerging artists of vision who would otherwise remain culturally and socially isolated.

PVA serves an often ignored community of men and women with an accommodating and supportive art space located in one of New York’s vital cultural communities, where they express their creativity, sell their work and develop careers.
ARTnews, Arts and Antiques, The Folk Art magazine, Raw Vision, Folk Art Messenger and other important journals of art have recognized the highly-accomplished work of PVA’s artists and their emergence as cultural contributors.
PVA has organized major exhibitions with leading galleries and colleges in the United States and Europe focusing attention on the important cultural contributions of artists with disabilities.
PVA generates sales for the artists it represents, providing much needed economic opportunities.
PVA’s artists have been regular standouts at the annual International Outsider Art Fair in New York City and Vienna, where they have been enthusiastically embraced by collectors of contemporary and outsider art.
In his proclamation, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg praised “the dedication and ingenuity of this pioneering studio.”

Studio Tours

Tours of the Pure Vision Arts studio are provided for art collectors, aligned agencies, potential program participants, prospective volunteers, and other interested individuals and groups. As interest in PVA has expanded, so have the number of requests for tours of our studio and overall facility. While we make every effort to accommodate each request, please bear in mind that our time and resources to meet this growing demand are limited, and that for professional organizational tour requests we may ask for a voluntary sliding fee to help defray the staff costs associated with providing tours. All collected fees go directly back to the art program.