The high number of writers, musicians, and visual artists who have spent time in mental institutions like Creedmoor might suggest a link between mental instability and creativity, an idea fully endorsed by Creedmoor psychologist Dr. János Marton:
“Extreme creativity and mental illness overlap. And if you are not mentally ill and you are creating great art, you are most likely using drugs or alcohol. You are cheating.
In 1983, Marton and artist Bolek Greczynski turned a dilapidated 40,000-square-foot former dining hall into the Living Museum, the first working studio and gallery dedicated to art made by psychiatric patients. Today, it holds the largest collection of outsider art in the country.
Practically every square inch is devoted to creative expression. Old palettes encrusted with layers of dried paint, soup cans full of Sharpies, multi-colored skeins of yarn, stacks of metal hangers, piles of pastels and pipe cleaners, and towers of spray-painted CRT screens, a collision of color and materials crammed into every corner and corridor.
At the center of the main room, what was once the kitchen, a massive shiny ventilation hood hovers 10 feet off the ground, like a ’60s spaceship, all curves and chrome, festooned with flags and multi colored canvases.
A yarn-wrapped tree branch sprouts from the top of the ventilation hood, and a small bunker-like room built from cinderblocks is tucked away inside it. The room was filled with stacks of LPs ranging from Tchaikovsky to Joni Mitchell and, probably, some Bud Powell and Lou Reed too.
It is a remarkable place, and I think it may be the city’s greatest museum, or at least its most alive.