Friday April 13, 2012
7pm-10pm
Wear This!: Artist-Made Couture to Challenge Discrimination
A unique performance and party will launch Workman Arts’ 25th Anniversary prior to the one-day symposium Extraordinary Artists: The Convergence of Art and Mental Illness in the 21st Century. This runway-style presentation of wearable couture by Workman artists will challenge norms, shift boundaries and inspire
dialogue about mental illness and creativity. Ticket price includes presentation and reception.
Saturday April 14, 2012
9:30am-5:30pm
Exceptional Minds: The Convergence of Art and Mental Illness in the 21st Century
Some of our greatest artists have been mentally ill – painters like Patterson Ewen, Adolf Wölfi, Richard Dadd, Henry Darger,
William Kurelek, Vincent van Gogh, Picasso, Lawren Harris and Tom Thomson; musicians including Mozart, Beethoven, Glenn Gould,
André Mathieu and Tchaikovsky; and writers like Eugene O’Neil, Graham Greene and Leo Tolstoy. This list is only a sample of
the artistic greats from our history that drew some of their energy and inspiration from their illness.
Join practicing artists and theorists of culture and art as they explore the always timely question of how our societies as
a whole benefit from artists with mental illness.
This symposium, a partnership between the AGO and Workman Arts, brings together the doers, the thinkers and the topics, including
setting the historical context of the nexus between madness and art, and What’s in a Name?, a consideration of the impact of language and terminology such as art brut, outsider art and art by the mentally ill.
Attend in person or listen on-line at your desktop. Recordings of the four one-hour sessions will be available afterwards,
bringing together artists living and working with mental illness, scholars and academics and your peers as they explore the
synergies and contradictions of art and mental illness.
Gallery Intervention: artists with mental illness will respond to works exhibited by the AGO, creating an interactive audio
tour. This intervention, created to complement the symposium, will stimulate continuing discourse and consideration of the
affinity of artists and mental illness.
Speakers include:
Kay Redfield Jamison (Keynote) Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Honorary Professor, Department of English,
University of St. Andrews, U.K.
Otto Wahl Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Hartford
Hans Looijen Director, Het Dolhuys, National Museum of Psychiatry, Netherlands; Chairman, International Madness and Arts Foundation
Janos Marton Director and co-founder of The Living Museum, Creedmore Psychiatric Centre, Queens New York
All events take place at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Tickets to go on sale February 2012.
Please check details on www.workmanarts.com or www.ago.net
Centre for Addiction
