Melissa Kreider, “keeping an eye on what’s around me (c-ptsd, incarceration by another name)”/Photo: Center for Mad Culture
The Dunning neighborhood is located on the city’s Northwest side; it’s home to the Eli’s Cheesecake Company, Wilbur Wright College, and the memory of the Cook County Insane Asylum. The legacy of the asylum, known in local shorthand as “Dunning,” is grim as is much of psychiatry’s instrumentalization and institutionalization under systems of oppression: see the history of France’s Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, which was also a women’s prison that housed women and their children who were too poor and ill for French society; or the American medical establishment’s long tradition of overdiagnosing Black patients with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (almost 2.5 times that of white patients) due to a combination of clinical bias and a lack of recognition of deep-rooted social and economic disparities.
I say this not to claim that psychiatry hasn’t ever been of service to those who have most needed help, but when a system dedicated to alleviating suffering is thrust into and put to work within a country like America, whose medical system is inextricably tied to the special interests ($$$) of big pharma and the country’s carceral system in which forty-three percent of prisoners in state prisons have received a diagnosis of mental health disorder but little to no treatment, well that is grim indeed. (Note too that mental health crises are often responded to as a criminal offense and once imprisoned, those who are jailed are often seen as a cheap and expendable labor force, see the recent ruling out of California; in other words $$$.)
Brianna Noonan, “Invocation: Hereditary Hauntings”/Photo: Center for Mad Culture
Plans for the Cook County Insane Asylum began around 1851, with building beginning ten miles from the Loop. On one-hundred-and-sixty acres, demarcated by Irving Park Road, Montrose Avenue and Oak Park Avenue, Cook County began building both the asylum and a poor farm (according to the online Encyclopedia project of the Chicago Historical Society). The poor farm came first—and here we can see one of the many places history doesn’t repeat but does rhyme—as the County’s efforts to support the poor and destitute became intertwined with the idea of “illness.” To be poor meant (and still many times means) the fragile membrane that separates you from illness as a way of being in the world is easily shattered. Whether this means you have no access to healthcare, or you have medical debt, or pre-existing conditions, or dwindling psychic resources to deal with the stress all of these factors generate, to be poor in America is often considered a sickness in itself.
The asylum’s building was finished in 1870 and in an 1885 issue of the Chicago Tribune, a Dunning whistleblower named Mrs. Dr. Alexander disclosed to the paper that “the manner in which the institution has been managed recently is a disgrace to ordinary decency and humanity.”
In the above paragraphs, I tend to talk around mental health. I talk about what it means to be vulnerable, to be overworked, poor, tired and cordoned off from the country’s pre-existing social order. I talk about what it means to be imprisoned, to be alone, because all of these things combine to form a picture of what mental health looks like in America. No one lives in a vacuum, we’re touched by all that we touch in turn, and it’s this web that The Center for Mad Culture explores in “Dunning,” a multidisciplinary exhibition featuring works by nine visual artists, ten poets and three performers that examines both the legacy of the asylum and each artist’s own experiences within this place that holds our own web of togetherness, of loneliness, of difference, of surveillance.
Kiera Wood, “Daphne and Apollo”/Photo: Center for Mad Culture
With performances by Stephanie Heit, Robert Ives and Petra Kuppers that challenge normative ideas of belonging through movement, poems by Heit, Joy Young, Evan Reynolds, Titus Wonsey, Charlie Nutley, Ives, U.P. 14060, Saleem Hue Penny, Gabrielle Jensen, Edwin Parker in a book that accompanies the exhibition, and visual work by Cam Collins, Lily Cozzens, Melissa Kreider, Keira Wood, Brianna Noonan, Joshua With and Genevieve Ramos, Michael Michalski, Megan Sterling, there are twenty-one artists total involved in the show’s undertaking, a nod to the Asylum’s twenty-one original cells. Created too in partnership with Hyde Park Art Center’s Artists Run Chicago Fund and Art Design Chicago, through the Terra Foundation, the exhibition is an opportunity not just for viewers to rethink how they view the hidden histories of Chicago’s most vulnerable, but to celebrate the resistance of those most silenced by systems that feed off of profit and disenfranchisement.
All visual artists were given a wood panel, 15.75 inches by 17.75 inches each, as a starting point, the size a reference to the original size of the Asylum’s patient cells (fifteen feet by seventeen feet). I’m particularly drawn to Keira Wood’s “Daphne and Apollo,” maybe because I’m reading author Heather Lewis’ account of a life taken too early by abuse and bitter power, my own early love of Greek myth, or the almost universal feeling of being hounded, of violated, by something or someone you can’t seem to fight. This is a feeling that tastes like hopelessness; the chance for something better, something else, something, anything, melts like cotton in the mouth. Such a feeling, a weight upon the throat, is an apt metaphor for feeling shut off from the world like those first institutionalized in Dunning. Yet, the fact that her story can be told, can be mourned, can be claimed for a future that is better, that is different, that is more; now that is a victory, something hard won and serious, but a victory nonetheless.
Cam Collins, “Country Machine”/Photo: Center for Mad Culture
Daphne was a nymph who ran from the sun god Apollo when he wanted to take her, to rape her, to do what he wanted to her. She prayed for her father for deliverance, for help, for something else; anything other than the blinding heat that seemed to follow her behind the veil of her eyelids. We’ve all ran in life, whether it be from a god, a man, a woman, a feeling, a disaster, a death, or a new life, and whoever denies this is lying to you. In the drawing, Daphne wears a pained grimace as rays of sun radiate outward in a darkened forest. A tear slides down her cheek. Her neck is bent at an unnatural angle, her arms are broken against the boughs of the tree she slowly becomes. The lines of her figure and the tree merge into one uncanny form, a woman frozen in time, in pain, in this single moment. It’s something we’ve seen before, but this time she’s not alone.
In the show’s accompanying poetry book, there’s a line in Charlie Nutley’s poem “Red” that strikes me. Nutley writes “They say those who desire too much/Perish in the spectacle of fire.” Desiring too much feels fitting to describe how it feels to look upon “Dunning”: The Center for Mad Culture’s exhibition is one that makes you wish for a better world, wish for something more than we have, and wish for ways to secure resources, dignity and care for us all.
“Dunning” is on view at The Center for Mad Culture, 410 South Michigan, through December 31.