86 Reasons: Artist’s Tour and Fireside Chat
Past Event
Institute for Human Science and Culture
Please join us on Wednesday, October 4 for an artist-led tour of Kimberly Chapman's Eighty-Six Reasons for Asylum Admission followed by a fireside chat about the history of women’s mental health, institutionalization, and the impacts still felt today.
Schedule of Events
Artist’s Tour (6:00 PM – 6:30 PM)
Ohio porcelain sculptor Kimberly Chapman focuses on what women endure. She sheds light on dark subjects including mental asylum abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, shaming, the fight for reproductive freedom and circus performers. Her creamy white objects force the viewer to contemplate universal cruelty and injustice through the female lens.
Hand-building, slip-casting and press-molding techniques are employed. Clay is stretched and pulled to encourage an “other worldly” appearance. Clear glaze and luster are used sparingly so not to cover the essence of the clay’s natural beauty.
Her traveling exhibition, Eighty-Six Reasons for Asylum Admission, includes sculpture and photography components. This teaching collection has toured university galleries, museums and historical venues. Heavily steeped in research, the mental asylum experience, filled with suffering and sadness, is illuminated.
Kimberly’s work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions and in over 50 curated and juried exhibitions since her 2017 graduation from the Cleveland Institute of Art. Prior to that, she spent three decades marketing corporations and colleges.
Her article “Out of the White Cube” was published in Ceramic Monthly, Oct. 2022. Other feature stories include: The Cleveland Arts Network Journal, Mar. 2021, Cleveland Magazine’s Community Leader, Feb. 2020, Northeast Ohio’s Canvas, Spring 2019, and Ceramics Monthly, Dec. 2018.
Fireside Chat (6:45 PM – 7:30 PM)
Kimberly Chapman will be joined by two guest speakers to discuss the themes brought forward by her artwork.
Dr. Hillary M. Nunn, The University of Akron Department of English
Hillary M. Nunn is a Professor of English at The University of Akron. Her current research focuses on Renaissance domestic medical knowledge as reflected in women’s manuscript cookbooks. Her classes often ask students to consider ways that literature depicts issues of health, science, and learning, from the vantage points of both patient and caregiver. With Madeline Bassnett, she edited the collection In the Kitchen, 1550-1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad (Amsterdam UP, 2022) and she is a co-founding member of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC).
Dr. Pamela Takayoshi, Kent State University Department of English
Pamela Takayoshi is Professor of English at Kent State University. Her curiosity about 19th century insane asylums resulted in a collection of 33 memoirs written by 23 women incarcerated in American insane asylums between 1823 – 1898. While a handful of these memoirs have received some attention, the majority have not; tracking them down and getting copies of them from state archives, local historical societies, research libraries, and the Library of Congress resulted in the surprisingly robust body of work neglected by most scholarship on 19th century America. Dr. Takayoshi has published four scholarly articles about the women and their experiences, and she is working on a book on the women’s lives for a public audience. Enriched by genealogical research about the author’s lives, contemporary historical accounts, and research trips across the country to 15 (abandoned, repurposed, or demolished) asylums, the forthcoming book introduces these fascinating women to readers as social activists committed to better care for the mentally ill and to a patient-centered approach to mental health care.
Reception (7:30 PM – 8:00 PM)
Guests are invited to explore the Eighty-Six Reasons for Asylum Admission exhibit. Light refreshments will be offered.
Plan Your Visit
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