The exhibition is one of the most sophisticated yet in efforts to unlock the beauty of the visual arts for those unable to see them. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery in London are among several museums that organize activities for blind visitors, including special guided tours, drawing classes, and “touch” workshops, in which blind people can feel sculptures. The Louvre in Paris also has a Tactile Gallery that contains copies of some of its sculptures.

Other examples include the Museo Nacional de San Carlos, in Mexico City, which was among the pioneers in using collage to reproduce paintings that could be felt by the blind, and the Denver Art Museum, which has been collaborating with Ann Cunningham, an art teacher at the Colorado Center for the Blind, to create tactile art.

Ms. Cunningham said she had seen “real momentum” recently in making art accessible to the blind. She attributed part of the growing interest in tactile art to the fact that “blind educators figured out that they definitely need to make information more accessible to students” because “as textbooks got more and more heavy on the graphics, all that information that students used to get through text was beginning to pass them by.”

The idea that blind people should touch 3-D print copies of paintings, however, goes significantly further than other efforts to make art accessible, and it represents a costly investment as well as a technological challenge.