Searching the Way
The Artists of Studio A Gateway Arts
Arnheim Gallery
January 19-February 5, 2010
Reception: February 3, 5-7 pm
Russell McNaught, 2008
Read more about Gateway Arts
This show was curated by Scott Alberg, Teacher Preparation Program student. He worked at Gateway for nine years in a variety of roles, assisting with the gallery, promoting the artists’ work, and working with the artists in the studios. During his last one-and-a-half years there, he oversaw the administration and daily functioning of the Studio A program as well as working with the artists.
Curatorial Statement
Studio A at Gateway Arts is an artspace for adults who, despite living with significant psychiatric disabilities, have dedicated themselves to the making of art. It is the only program in the country dedicated exclusively to assisting artists with psychiatric disabilities establish a career in art. The artists who participate in the program come from a variety of backgrounds. Some have studied art in college and have earned degrees, while others had limited experience making art seriously before entering the program. This exhibition highlights half of the thirty artists who work in Studio A on a daily basis. The studio not only provides space and materials to artists, but it also assists them with the marketing and promotion of their work through the Gateway Gallery, the Gateway craft store, and by facilitating opportunities for exhibition outside the program. This exhibition is an example of the later activity, as staff solicited artists to submit work to us. Three colleagues and I then submitted the work to the Arnheim Gallery in the form of a proposal. Over the years many Mass Art students and alumni have either interned or been employed by Gateway Arts.
This exhibition is a survey of the work produced at Studio A over the course of many years. What unites the artists in the show is the deeply personal nature of their work and their process. Studio A artists tend to focus on their surroundings, their experiences, and their desires as a source of subject matter. Many utilize methodologies long familiar to contemporary artists, such as appropriation, self-reflexive formalism, or the sampling of a variety of pop-cultural references. For several in the show, art is a means toward the production of personal mythologies and the expression of a world-view that in turn resonates against the kind of stigmatization and alienation experienced by some who live with psychiatric disabilities.
It is important to stress that the work in the exhibition was not produced as a form of therapy, nor was it produced with the same motivations and compulsions that often characterize the so-called “art of the mentally ill.” The significant interest of artists, scholars, and doctors in “psychotic art” or what became known as “art brut”, grew out of the Romantic movement of the 19th century, the growth of asylums, and the burgeoning field of psychiatry. It was believed that this work was an expression of those who existed somehow outside of culture, somewhere on the periphery of normality and reason. The inclination of the collective of artists who practice at Studio A and Gateway Arts as a whole mark a sharp break with this kind of discourse. Instead of an institutionally imposed isolation from the world, it is an engagement with culture and life that is celebrated. The motivation of Studio A and its artists is to position the work along the spectrum of the contemporary discourse. It is work that participates fully with current debates on what is beautiful, important, and profound. At times it is work that can question our fundamental assumptions of what art is, what art looks like, and what art can be.
Scott Alberg (TPP 2010)
With Gary Batty, Stephen DeFronzo, and Faith Johnson