SUNDAY MARCH 30, 2014
ID-EGO-SUPEREGO:
ART FROM THE LIVING MUSEUM
AT CREEDMOOR PSYCHIATRIC CENTER
OPENING SUNDAY MARCH 30, 2014
SYMPOSIUM FRIDAY APRIL 4, 2014
CENTER FOR MODERN PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDIES
16 WEST 10TH STREET, NEW YORK NEW YORK 10011
In 1982, Dr. Janos Marton, together with his friend, the artist Bolek Greczynski, transformed Building 75, a 44,000 square foot abandoned food preparation and dining hall on the grounds of Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, New York, into an art environment, complete with a museum, individual studios, and open workshop areas. The Living Museum is the first successful model of an Art Asylum in the United States, where patients thrive as artists in a self-run creative environment. All of these patients have been labeled as insane and treated accordingly. Many of them have spent decades, if not their entire adult life, in mental hospital. Over the course of more than 30 years, the Living Museum has opened its doors to many such patients from the wards of Creedmoor who have had the natural impulse and passion to make art. Among them are several who are exceptionally gifted and deserve the recognition as artists which would transcend the stigma associated with their persistent and chronic mental illness. Participants in the Living Museum are given access to time, space and materials, and free rein to do as they please. The vision of the Living Museum is to create an environment and an attitude toward art-making and mental illness which is both healing and transformative of the identity of the artist/patient. It has sought to create a utopian space, in which art transforms the individual from a “mental patient” into an “artist.” “Turning vulnerability into your weapon,” the founding manifesto of the Living Museum, allows this change in identity to become reality.
The psychic energies of Freud’s structural model of the mind, Id-Ego-Superego, are rarely manifested in such authentic and unfettered images as in those of the artists at the Living Museum. It is the unhampered access to “other realities,” free expression of the personal unconscious, the transcendent world of the spiritual, and the uninhibited erotic imagination, that makes these works so powerful, touching and communicative. The exhibition has been curated by Janos Marton (Ego), Alexandra Plettenberg (Superego), and Steven Poser (Id).
Presenters
Janos Marton, Ph.D., is the co-founder of the Living Museum at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center and Director for more than 25 years.
Alexandra Plettenberg, Ph.D., is the Curator and author of several monographs about artists of the Living Museum. Before joining the museum in 2007, she worked as an art therapist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute Schizophrenia Research Unit. She is the author of Divinity in Madness (2009), Issa Ibrahim (2010), Art Asylum (with Janos Marton) 2010, John Tursi (2011), and Richard Smith (2012).
Steven Poser, Ph.D. is a member of the faculty and training analyst at CMPS. For two years, he was a psychotherapy intern on the female ward for chronic schizophrenia at the Hudson River Psychiatric Center in Poughkeepsie, New York. He has been an exhibiting artist for more than twenty years. He is currently writing a book about the visionary painter, Forrest Bess.
