All brains are different, in the same way everyone’s face is different. Infant faces look more similar than 40-year-old faces do because experience and learning are reflected in one’s face. The same process occurs with the brain.

Infants are born with different potentials for development. It was not a coincidence that Picasso’s father was a painter, for example, and that Mozart’s father was a musician. Children with autism also inherit some predilections from their parents, but some of these things can also direct development in the characteristic ways that have come to be called “autism.” Clearly there is more public awareness, more education, and less social stigma about autism than there is about some other disability labels—such as “mental retardation”—and there are more entitlements associated with autism as a category of disability. Over the last 20 years, this category has indeed gained a certain mystique.

This past Friday, at the brand new Autistic Services, Inc. facility at 699 Hertel Avenue, these considerations were given the full range of visibility. In a building that used to be the warren for telemarketing’s feverish minions, there is instead a communications facility of a far different sort. In the well-lit corridors of the structured day program, guests at a wine-and-cheese event were able to feast their eyes as well on bright artworks, engaging, enigmatic, and lining the hallways in great abundance.

Large works on canvas present generous, unstinting opportunity for artistic expression. All the artists in the program are given the opportunity to work with enough paint, enough film, enough paper to conceive their personal visions. Professional attention to detail made this opening truly a gallery show—not just pieces set on tables or paintings clumped together, indifferently hung in a dimly lit space. There were paintings that recalled Basquiat and other New York City artists of the 1980s, as well as Jean Dubuffet, the mid-20th-century French painter who himself was fascinated by the art he saw visiting the state institutions of his day.

One program participant, Richard Nesbitt, exhibited a photographic tableau combining oil chalk in brilliantly hued scribbled grids with his own plastic toy horses arranged in the foreground. Nesbitt’s work was chosen as best in show at a recent exhibit at CEPA gallery.

Teaching artists Dana Ranke, Brian Kavanaugh, and Todd Lesmeister work closely with executive director Veronica Fredericoni to facilitate an instructive environment for creative expression and the opportunity for meaningful and productive activity for both child and adult participants.

—j. tim raymond