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Articles: Mental patients' art gets museum showing

Posted by admin on Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - 01:44 AM

For a long time, Philip Brubaker didn't want too many people to know that his photographs were on display in the hallways of a hospital's psychotic disorders unit. If they knew, he figured they'd also realize he was bipolar.
Eventually, Brubaker could no longer keep secret his art or his illness, which was diagnosed two years ago. "I was so proud of my work that I told people I was bipolar," the 24-year-old Greensboro student said. Now Brubaker has gone even more public, putting one of his photographs on display in the education wing of the North Carolina Museum of Art. The exhibit, "Brushes With Life: Art, Artists and Mental Illnesses," is the museum's first of art created exclusively by mental health patients. The artists are patients or former patients in the University of North Carolina's Schizophrenic Treatment and Evaluation Program (STEP). Some have trained in art, others have not. For the artists, the state art museum is a far more public space than the third floor of a neurosciences building in the congested hospital area of UNC-Chapel Hill. The exhibit, in a section of the museum reserved for student art, "offers ... an official sanction for the artists," Deborah Reid Murphy, assistant director of education at the museum, said. "And it's outside the mental health arena, which speaks to the importance of those artists to the broader community." The approximately 35 works in the show range from lovely, impressionistic oil landscapes by Ramell Moore to disturbing pieces of writing on mirrored glass by Colette Corr. The glass in one of Corr's three pieces is broken; written on it in marker is "Distorted Perspective." Another reads "Perceptual Difficulties" and "Can you see your real self or is it a reverse image?" The third has a compact disc at the top with "Big Brother" written on it. "Big Brother is Real. Big Brother is Now. Are you paranoid enough to survive?" Corr writes at the end of a tirade about the possibility of being punished for "thought crimes." Artistic expression Brubaker's black-and-white photograph, "Warehouse," shows the inside of an abandoned building located in a scrap metal yard not far from his home in Greensboro. "I just love abandoned buildings in general -- they're like modern ruins to me," Brubaker said. "I wonder who lived there, who worked there, what was the purpose of this building." The exhibit has been shown elsewhere, including a seven-month stint at Raleigh-Durham International Airport. But the art museum provides both a larger and more sophisticated space, said Dr. Nancy Clayton, an assistant professor in the UNC psychiatry department and a co-chair of the STEP art gallery committee. "The artists were definitely excited and honored to display their art at the Museum of Art," she said. "It's a more prestigious venue for our artists." After the exhibit ends August 15, the artwork will be available for other arts centers to display. Although there's a romanticized notion of a connection between mental illness and creativity (Vincent van Gogh produced "Starry Night" while in a French asylum), Clayton said she's not seen any medical proof of one. "There isn't really any great propensity for people struggling with mental illness to be artistic, but they may have more issues that they might want to express through art," she said. Some artists say their medications suppress their creativity, taking away the mania and its predecessor, hypomania, that provides their ideas. Brubaker agrees, but only to an extent. "When you're in a hypomanic or manic state, the ideas are often flying at you," he said. "But to be creative, you also need to have a level of concentration, perseverance and judgment that you don't necessarily have in a hypomanic state. The ideas may not come as fast and loose, but I think you do more polished work." 'Pride and self-esteem from art' The exhibit is the result of a collaboration between STEP and the museum that began a couple of years ago with classes at the hospital and the museum. But the art is not a formal part of the patients' treatment, Clayton said. If not for his photographs being displayed in the STEP gallery, Brubaker believes he would still be hiding his illness from the world. To tell family and friends about the exhibit, he had to also tell them he was bipolar. And when he did, "I encountered so many people who had a positive reaction and said they knew people who were bipolar," Brubaker said. "I don't feel so isolated in my illness now." Brubaker said he suffered from mania -- elevated moods that, in his case, included delusions and depression. He had taken photographs since he was 10, and his mother encouraged him to submit a photograph of a sunflower for the STEP gallery. It was accepted, several people ordered prints and a career was born. Now, Brubaker's illness is under control with medication; he said he's had no serious problems since his diagnosis. He's on track to graduate this year from UNC-Greensboro with a degree in filmmaking. He plans to move to Chapel Hill after graduation and hopes to make a living from his photography. "I get a feeling of pride and self-esteem from my art," Brubaker said. "And that helps me to have a positive outlook on things."

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