Description
Eighty-Six Reasons for Asylum Admission: A Domestic Beginning
An exhibit by Ohio porcelain artist Kimberly Chapman, explores why women were institutionalized in asylums from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1970s. The exhibit confronts the gendered and unequal treatment of these spaces. Constructed in 1825—just decades before the rise of organized feminism—the Baldwin Buss Merino House stands at the threshold of a period when women’s autonomy was tightly controlled, conditions that could later justify institutionalization.