Mad Couture Catwalk is a unique performance and party that 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.

The Bedlam Collection – Dress, Lisa Walter

Participating artists have been selected through a formal adjudication of proposals and will be supported through professional training workshops facilitated by artist/educator Elena Soni, who is working with the artists to best showcase their practice on the garments. The presentation will engage viewers and participants in a dialogue about where art ends and functionality begins. The audience will be treated to an experimental installation/performance in the form of a fashion show. This project will challenge norms, shift boundaries, and engage dialogue about the lives of the creators predicated by mental health and addiction issues and of those who dare don a work of art rather than a garment accepted as normal. Mad Couture Catwalk will include eleven artist “collections” in total.

Host
Hans Looijen, Director, Het Dolhuys National Museum of Psychiatry, Netherlands

Friday April 13, 2012 7pm-10pm
Art Gallery of Ontario
Weston Family Learning Centre

General Public $25, AGO Members $20, Students $15

Ticket price includes presentation and reception.

Tickets can be purchased at the AGO Box Office by phone at 416-979-6608 or on line http://tinyurl.com/7edv5ly.

 THE CONVERGENCE OF ART AND MENTAL ILLNESS IN THE 21st CENTURY

Presented as part of the Extraordinary Artists event at the AGO
Join practicing artists and theorists of culture and art as they explore the always timely question of how society as a whole benefits from artists with mental illness.

The Painter, William Kurelek

Some of the world’s greatest artists have been mentally ill – painters like Paterson Ewen, Emily Carr, Adolf Wölfi, Georgia O’Keeffe, Henry Darger, William Kurelek, Vincent van Gogh, Lawren Harris and Tom Thomson; musicians including Mozart, Beethoven, Glenn Gould, Sinead O’Conner and Tchaikovsky; and writers like Virginia Woolfe, Sylvia Plath 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.

This symposium brings together the do-ers, the thinkers and the topics, setting the historical context of the nexus between madness and art. It also poses the questions, “What’s in a name?”, what are assumptions around mental health and creativity, and how are these ideas informed by language and terminology?

Recordings of the symposium will be available as podcasts on the AGO’s website afterwards, bringing together artists living and working with mental illness, scholars and academics and community peers as they explore the synergies and contradictions of art and mental illness.

Saturday April 14, 9:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
AGO Baillie Court
General Public $160, AGO Members $135, Students $50

Tickets can be purchased at the AGO Box Office by phone at 416-979-6608 or on line http://tinyurl.com/73k3vgc.