There’s not much outside Building 75 of the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center that gives away the world behind its inconspicuous facade, except for a tree branch on the ground painted with the words “LIVING MUSEUM.”
But approach the side of the undistinguished two-story brown-brick building, look for a door underneath the awning, and ring the doorbell. An unlikely hub of the arts then begins to reveal itself on the vast mental health campus in Queens Village, where wild geese roam.
Surrounding the walls of a main room inside is art made by Creedmoor patients, including a new visual essay exhibition entitled “Time.” An introductory text offers glimpses into the artists’ thoughts: “Does time linger, when I’m depressed? Does time race when my brain is on fire with excitement and mood elevations?”
Upstairs, a verdant garden room filled with plants sits between rooms that display artworks, including a gigantic trash bin filled with hundreds of crumpled hospital memos and a tote bag with the words “A BAG OF LIES The hospital doesn’t always win!” handwritten on it.
Creedmoor had once been a world unto itself, housing in the late 1950s some 7,000 patients who farmed, raised livestock and lived on its 300-acre grounds. The psych center came to host giant kitchens, gymnasiums, even a theater and a power plant.
But outrage over the conditions inside America’s overcrowded mental institutions, plus a new generation of psychotropic drugs that promised to alleviate symptoms for many people living with severe mental illnesses, eventually hollowed out Creedmoor.
By the time former Creedmoor psychologist Dr. Janos Marton and Polish artist Bolek Greczynski co-founded the art studio and museum in 1983, just 1,300 inpatients remained on the desolating campus.
That year, Ed Koch’s administration sought to move up to 500 homeless men into two of Creedmoor’s vacant buildings and to build a garage there to park garbage trucks. But the Living Museum — now newly opened in a former dining hall where squirrels had moved into some of the abandoned rooms — promised to be a creative oasis where outpatients could go to create and display art, and where they would be celebrated first and foremost as artists in their own right.
Today, the museum is bursting with four decades worth of paintings, murals and installations created by Creedmoor artists, spanning themes that cover hospital life, religion, politics and ideas of home.
It continues to serve as a refuge for about 70 Creedmoor outpatients who work there regularly, many of them self-directed, and is open to the public by appointment.
All Creedmoor outpatients, plus a few authorized inpatients, are welcome to come and participate, the museum’s director, Dr. Mitra Reyhani Gahdim, explained when THE CITY visited The Living Museum on a recent Thursday.
“The philosophy is still the same,” Reyhani Gahdim said, standing in a main room where bottles of paints and bowls of crayons and coloring markers have been placed throughout the space. “It’s very simple: The ingredients are space and art materials — and really not getting into hierarchical stuff. I see people here as my fellow artists.”
‘This is What I Like to Do’
On the ground floor, past the main room where several artists’ stations and easels are located, Paula Brooks was making papier mache birds from diluted glue and tissue papers at her allotted studio space.
On one corner of her desk was a reference book of flowers. Behind her was a large canvas covered in pencil outlines of tulips, some of which she had already painted over with blue and yellow acrylic paint.
“This is what I like to do,” Brooks told THE CITY. “It’s soothing.”
The 45-year-old said she has been coming to the Living Museum almost every weekday since 2015, and that she has been interested in art since she was a child. Her grandmother, she recalled, had taught her to sew and knit and draw whenever she would visit her in the summertimes.
Brooks entered the mental health care system at 16 years old, she said, after a family member had laced her marijuana with crack cocaine and she developed a drug addiction. Her mother, she said, who was herself living with a drug addiction, soon committed her to Jamaica Hospital under the guise of a physical exam for school.
“No honey, you don’t go outside. Nobody goes outside over here,” Brooks recalled a hospital staffer telling her, referring to the moment she realized she had been institutionalized.
Brooks later spent years on the Creedmoor campus, she said, going back and forth between inpatient and outpatient care.
“I used to walk by here,” Brooks recalled, referring to the Living Museum.
But she had not realized what had been hiding beneath the museum’s sterile exterior, she said, until 2002, a year after she was discharged from inpatient care for the first time at age 21.
She had been looking for activities to help her keep some distance from her family, and someone at Jamaica Hospital then told her about a program that offered free art supplies, she said.
“They gave me an address down here,” she said. “Then I came, and they let me stay.”
In the years that have since passed, the Living Museum has become much more than just an escape from a difficult environment for Brooks. It has become the fertile ground where her creative endeavors have blossomed — and the reason she’s decided to pursue them full-time.
“This is my career now,” said Brooks, whose work has been shown at the Queens Museum. “I love being an artist.”
Other Creedmoor artists have also gone on to achieve some commercial success. That includes Issa Ibrahim, now an artist at Fountain House Studio in Long Island City, who also published a memoir and produced a musical documentary about his life and the mental health system.
‘A Happy Place’
In a city where people living with mental illnesses can feel isolated, the Living Museum also offers itself as a haven for Creedmoor patients to participate in the art of gathering.
“We are all a social sculpture,” said Reyhani Gahdim. “Maybe their art is their act of coming, hanging out, talking, having a cup of coffee, right? Everyone is an artist, even if they don’t paint.”
On days that the museum is open, outpatients living with varying degrees of autonomy mental capacities come to this home-like space to attend mindfulness workshops, to write, to get English tutoring, or simply to watch movies in one another’s company.
The Living Museum has proven itself to be a particularly precious space for social support, especially after deinstitutionalization emptied out mental health facilities like Creedmoor.
“Now they’re going back to understanding, in a way, that more community programs should be available, more socialization,” said Reyhani Gahdim, before raising the Living Museum’s offerings as an example. “They can do this!”
It’s a sentiment that echoes one from Marton, in a 1999 HBO documentary about the museum: “If you just produce art here, it becomes therapeutic in that you change your identity — you change your identity from that of the mental patient who was hospitalized, locked up, to that of an artist.”
Music abounds, too. On the day that THE CITY visited, a group gathered in a living-room-like space for conversations and tea after a twice-a-week Tai Chi class. Music from Ella Fitzgerald, picked out from a vinyl-filled listening lounge that once housed the dining hall’s kitchen, reverberated in the museum’s main room.
On one corner of the ground floor is a “rock room,” equipped with pianos, keyboards and amplifiers. It had been the home of the Living Museum band, according to a hand-drawn poster there from the year 2000 that described the ensemble as “an insane production.”
Two chairs are on display outside in the hallway. One had been painted with the words, “THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING” on it, and the other with the words, “HANG IN THERE”.
Visitor Peter Coleman, a care coordinator for people with developmental disabilities, was now making his way through the different spaces on the museum’s second floor. He was only discovering the Living Museum for the first time now, he said, although he had been frequenting another building within the Creedmoor grounds for work for years.
“I never knew this was here. I was 50 yards away,” he told THE CITY, noticeably in awe. “It’s amazing, because everytime I left that building I was in a bad mood. So if I knew this was here….
“It’s a happy place.”
Downstairs, an artist who asked for his name not to be published had just hung up a painting he had finished earlier in the day. It depicted a person entangled in bold red lines and gasping for air.
“This one looks different from my other paintings,” the 67-year-old remarked as he compared his new work to his old pieces, which often drew on religion or music as inspiration.
The South Bronx native used to work at a video tape distribution facility, he said, and spent years at Long Island Jewish Medical Center while living with paranoid schizophrenia. He started coming to the Living Museum in 2011, he explained, after visiting for the first time during a field trip with a different outpatient program.
“As soon as I got here, I wanted to go home and do art,” he said. “It’s so magical. It’s so inspiring. When you look at it — it’s spectacular work.”
He now comes to the Living Museum about twice a week to work on his craft, he said, and otherwise makes art at home. But he said living on his own gets lonely.
Asked whether that’s why he comes to the museum as frequently as he does, he paused before responding: “It could be.”