ASYLUM: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals

ASYLUM: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals. A Photographer's Journey Chris Payne NEW DATE: Friday, July 10 NEW TIME: 1:00 p.m. The Urban Center 457 Madison Avenue For more than half the nation's history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States. Yet in the second half of the twentieth century, after the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these massive buildings neglected and abandoned. Photographer Chris Payne will discuss and show images from his six-year research and book project, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals (MIT Press, forthcoming September 2009), which explores the architecture, decay, and presence in the American landscape of state mental hospitals. Trained as an architect, Chris Payne is a large format photographer whose passion is documenting America's vanishing architecture and industrial landscape. His first book, New York’s Forgotten Substations: The Power Behind the Subway (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), offered dramatic, first-time views of the behemoth machines that are hidden behind modest facades in New York City. Payne is a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the recipient of a Graham Foundation grant and was a former Architectural League-sponsored recipient of a New York State Council on the Arts Independent Projects grant. Chris Payne is a 2008 Artist Fellowship recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). This presentation is co-sponsored by Artists and Audiences Exchange, a NYFA public program. Please RSVP at [email protected]. Admission is free and open to all. For general information, email [email protected] or call 212.753.1722 x13. AIA and New York State continuing education credits are available. http://archleague.org/index-dynamic.php?show=925