Exhibit highlights old asylums’ links to communities

His finished product, "Asylum," currently on exhibit at Ohio University's Kennedy Museum of Art, captures their ruin as well as their remnants in order to cast a new light on these stigmatized institutions.

In 2002, photographer Christopher Payne embarked on a six- year historical and artistic endeavor to document the "closed world" of state mental hospitals, visiting a total of 70 institutions in 30 states.

The museum itself is an appropriate location for Payne's exhibit, since the historic building it inhabits was the main administration building of the former Athens Asylum.

Featured in the October issue of Guernica Magazine and American Photo, "Asylum" is a traveling exhibition containing between 25 and 30 photos depicting these monolithic structures and their inner workings. Payne himself travels, giving lectures on his work, making stops at various prestigious institutions including Harvard Medical School, NYU, and the exhibit's current residence in the Kennedy Museum.

A graduate of Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, Payne is trained as an architect. During his lecture at the historic and relevant venue inside the Ridges Auditorium, he described the buildings he shot as, "certainly hellish warehouses, but asylums in the truest sense of the word."

Fueled by an interest in industrial design, Payne strove to reveal "the more objective ideals" these structures were founded upon.

Although not featured in the exhibit itself, the Athens community holds an intimate tie to Payne's work. The former Athens Mental Health Center (or asylum, as the center was known previously) was photographed and served as one of the first stops on his asylum expedition.

On a quest to reveal more than the visible faade, Payne said the conditions of the institutions he encountered varied greatly.

He explained, "A lot of places I saw were in really great shape, tin ceilings, elegant little light fixtures, and others had been reduced to ruin."

Due to restoration work in the 1990s, the former Athens Mental Health Center, now known as the Ridges, did not offer Payne much material for his artistic expose. However, it is unique among former American asylums, he said, in being "one of the only success stories in the country.

"You have this museum and studios and then this abandoned world... (then) you open a door, everything goes to gray, and the temperature drops."

Most asylums Payne photographed met a swift demise during an era of reform and deinstitutionalization. According to Payne, state mental hospital systems declined in the 1960s with the introduction of psychotropic drugs, which replaced treatments now considered inhumane, such as electric shock therapy and lobotomies, both of which were practiced at the Athens Mental Health Center/asylum in the mid-20^th century.

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL WELFARE History in North America suggests that the asylums' final and dramatic decline in the 1980s was a byproduct of the Reagan presidency. Federal involvement was curtailed, and the financial burden of funding care was passed to the states, which eventually could not afford to sustain the institutions.

"I felt a certain sadness for the buildings, and unlike Athens most of these institutions have no future," Payne said.

He said that after their closings, most of these grand institutions were sold as surplus properties; some were turned into prisons and others were simply demolished.

The Athens Mental Health Center and its surrounding property, however, escaped that fate when the Ohio Legislature voted to transfer them to Ohio University in the summer of 1988.

As The Athens NEWS reported on Oct. 27, 1988, after the property's transfer, OU solicited proposals for the old Mental Health Center's building and land. Among them were a retirement center, chipmunk study area, botanical gardens, observatory, equestrian facility and an educational facility. According to forgottenoh.com and the official university websites, the property was renamed the Ridges in 1991 and renovations began on many of the buildings. Out of the 30 main buildings, 17 were ultimately altered to fit the university's plans, eventually producing a museum, research center, child-care center, office buildings, mail center, maintenance shop, auditorium, and rental property, among many others.

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN PAYNE'S artistic vision and Athens' former mental institution centers upon its design foundations according to the Kirkbride plan. As explained by Payne and detailed in the Kirkbridebuilding website, Thomas Story Kirkbride was the father of an innovative architectural design that spread across the country and led to the construction of hundreds of asylums from the mid to late 1800s. The Kirkbride model, present in all of Payne's photographs, was based upon the belief that an "idyllic setting could make people better." It was the idea of "moral treatment," Payne said.

These colossal institutions brought a unique form of therapy not just within the buildings themselves, but with the incorporation of the surrounding landscape boasting farms, gardens, orchards, walkways, lakes and areas for production. Payne explained that this set-up made these institutions self -sustainable.

Patients were expected to work on the farms, the roads and in the factories, producing all their own supplies from eggs to straightjackets.

"There is sense of community that the buildings and land create together... There are no people in my photographs, but it is not hard to imagine," he said.

In congruence with Payne's observations, the Athens Mental Health Center forged a bond of reliance between the citizens of the county and the institution.

A doctoral dissertation by Katherine Ziff on the Athens Asylum and community demonstrates that from the opening of the then Athens Lunatic Asylum in 1867, the town and asylum were connected economically, socially, geographically and politically. The two had a reciprocal relationship based on the institution's requirement for goods and services and Athens citizens' need for employment and capital.

During his photographic journey, Payne was often met with awkward silence by the people he encountered while touring various asylums, some of who believed he was intruding. However, upon mentioning the areas' self-sustainability, Payne likened his experience to "turning on a faucet you can't shut off."

He spoke similarly of his visit to Athens, explaining, "stories came out of the woodwork; so many had personal connections (to the asylum) in this town."

Athens citizens' recognition and value of the relationship between the asylum and community was displayed during the land transfer from the state Department of Mental Health to OU, which triggered a bitter local debate.

On April 28,1988, The Athens NEWS ran a derisive letter to the editor in which two local activists voiced serious concerns about the land-transfer legislation.

"The state hospital has played a vital role in the economic historic history and cultural development of Athens County and southeastern Ohio," they wrote. "The fate of this important resource in Athens County is in the hands of people who do not live here and have never seen it. This power grab by some members of the university administration alienates many Athens County residents..."

During the debate, others voiced concerns that OU would let the old buildings and land fall into ruin, and wouldn't use them to benefit the community.

At the time, university officials and supporters of the land transfer pointed out that no other entity had the financial and human resources to preserve and utilize the buildings on the Ridges, or the several hundred acres of land surrounding them.

As it turns out, OU eventually managed to mollify most of the critics, investing ample resources into renovating the old buildings, finding uses for them, and creating a land lab and park on the many acres of pasture, orchards and forest.

THE LATE '80s DEBATE over the future of the Ridges illustrated the deep personal bond between the old asylum and the community. The same sort of energy fueled what Payne later attempted to accomplish by photographically moving beyond the stigma of mental illness to reveal these structures for their grandeur, as monuments of a specific progressive era in the treatment of mental conditions.

One of Payne's photos displays an array of toothbrushes, hung like shadowbox ornaments, each intricately detailed with the patient's name on the handle. Photos such as these remind the viewer of the humanity rather than the horror often associated with these institutions.

Edward Pauley, director of the Kennedy Museum of Art, noted that the Ridges buildings carry with them a lot of history. "There are thousands of stories and memories associated with these structures," he said. "Payne's photographs remind us of the idealism that once influenced the treatment of mental illness in America."

The "Asylum" exhibit is set to remain at the Kennedy Museum until Jan. 2, 2011.

"The Ridges are embedded in Athens - both physically and historically. Its towering buildings seem to watch over the city and are a dynamic part of Athens' past and present," said Pauley.