THE LIVING MUSEUM

JANUARY 9 - MARCH 2, 2025

There is this question of, Would van Gogh have been a great artist if he would not have been mentally ill? I think that mental illness is an asset in art. You don’t have to be mentally ill to be a great artist, but you definitely have to work very hard to get to a spot where mentally ill people are automatically.

 - Dr. Janos Marton, Co-founder of The Living Museum

FIERMAN presents a group exhibition of artists who make their work at the Living Museum, an institution dedicated to the production, dissemination, and preservation of art by the patients of Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, the largest state psychiatric care center in New York City. It is the first working studio and museum of its kind and holds the largest collection of outsider art in the United States. In 1983, Dr. Janos Marton, a psychologist at Creedmoor, invited Bolek Greczynski, a Polish artist known for his work in political art and experimental theater, to join the hospital staff. Together, the two guided the transformation of a disused dining hall on the Creedmoor grounds into a place of extraordinary beauty. Today, 70 or so artists work at the museum regularly.  

To visit to the Living Museum is to grasp and participate in the Beuysian ideal of social sculpture, in which  people contribute to a living, polymorphous “total art work.” For Beuys and the creators of the Museum, the social sculpture both engenders and harnesses the radical freedom of artistic expression. An art world built on hierarchies and exclusivities is essentially static and inward facing; inversely The Living Museum thrives on spontaneous creation and interpersonal exchange. Every surface of the museum contains art made on site over its 40+ year history - sculptures stand atop the former oven vents some thirty feet off the ground, while paintings hang salon style, organized by theme. A wall of depictions of clocks and hourglasses figuratively and allusively representing time abuts a suite of chairs both sculptural and functional emblazoned with the words ME, YOU, GODOT. Behind the chairs hang dozens of portraits, some acutely detailed, others graphically abstract. The artists themselves are present. Some have sustained studio practices, working daily at the museum over many years, while others are more transitory. Support staff, artists, and members of the public - the museum is open daily - interweave in the labyrinthine space to create this ever changing total work of art. The sustenance is both emotional and physical when sitting and chatting over a cup of tea in the chairs surrounding Museum director Mitra Rehyani Ghadim’s desk. 

At FIERMAN, paintings, drawings, collages, and sculpture from nearly twenty artists made in the past thirty years  hang together.  John Tursi, called “closest to genius status” by Roberta Smith in 2002, contributes vividly geometric, coyly humorous figures vacillating between man and machine. Nyla Isaac’s art historically infused portraits and still lives swirl with the drifts of her complex mind. Christina Constantine’s paintings and assemblage imbue Albers’ color theory with emotional intuition, while Paula Brooks’ purity of line and flat color fuse cartooning with cool modernism.  The styles on view are disparate, the emotional import is unifying. The content and installation of the exhibition will change over its duration through March 2, so please make sure to return.