This week on the Disabilities Beat: a Buffalo photography exhibit showcases the stories of women who were institutionalized at the former Buffalo State Asylum.
While the exhibit humanizes these women through artifacts from their lives and stories from their families, it also is part of a larger movement to find and preserve the stories of people who were once institutionalized.
TRANSCRIPT:
Emyle Watkins:
Hi, I'm Emyle Watkins, and this is the Disabilities Beat.
Emyle Watkins (on tape): What do you wish you could know about your great-grandmother?
Patricia Watkins: Everything. I wish I knew everything about her. I'd like to know if she had a sense of humor, because my father and all of her siblings were hilariously funny. So I figure they had to have been a riot.
Emyle Watkins: I met Patricia Watkins in a gallery at the Richardson Hotel, which used to be the Buffalo State Asylum. Her great-grandmother, Catherine "Kate" Higgins Watkins, was involuntarily committed there in the 1940s. I should also note, we're not related.
Patricia Watkins: I just want to know when her dementia started, when her diabetes started. Was she being treated for any of that by any doctors? I doubt it.
Emyle Watkins: Kate was a mother of two and a wife. Patricia's research shows Kate was committed in her 70s and died about a year and a half later. Her death certificate lists gangrene, arteriosclerosis, senile psychosis, and deterioration, which today we might describe as complications of Kate's diabetes and dementia, but that's about all Patricia knows.
Patricia Watkins: My father always just said granny was in the psych center. We don't talk about that. So it was very taboo.
Emyle Watkins: However, standing in the former asylum, now a hotel, Patricia was surrounded by people with similar stories. A gallery of photos showing mementos from women like Kate, shared by family members, including Patricia, who want their loved ones remembered for more than their institutionalization.
Patricia and I were standing at the opening of the exhibit for the Buffalo Remembrance Project.
Emyle Watkins (on tape): And the image you chose, can you talk a little bit about that image?
Patricia Watkins: Yeah, I just thought it was beautiful. She's wearing a beautiful black fur hat, or brown fur hat, I'm not sure of the color. And then a black coat with fur trim, and she just looks confident and maybe a little sassy.
Emyle Watkins: The Remembrance Project is a collaboration between the University at Buffalo's Anderson Gallery and artist Kimberly Chapman, whose work explores, in her words, “what women endure.”
Chapman worked with UB students to photograph and document the objects — books, photos, dolls, jewelry, and more. The exhibit is expected to remain for several months, although its long-term home is yet to be decided.
Kimberly Chapman:
Where will these stories live? That is a really good question. And whether it lives at The Richardson Hotel or the Lipsey Architecture Center or the University at Buffalo Anderson Gallery, we're really not sure yet.
Emyle Watkins: Michael Rembis, the director of the Center for Disability Studies at UB, says preserving and maintaining these records is a challenge.
Michael Rembis: The Buffalo Asylum is not really well documented, because many of the records were destroyed. And many of them are locked in Albany. It's very difficult to view them.
Emyle Watkins: His Communities of Care program is currently working on digitally preserving local records. His recent book, "Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum," also documents writings about life in the asylum.
Michael Rembis: They [asylums] were often deplorable places of confinement. I think that that would be my one sentence description — or fragment of a sentence description — of them.
I think some people found relief. And then I think even in my most recent book, people found community, they found friends, some people got married after they left the asylum. So I don't think we should portray them strictly as victims.
Emyle Watkins: Two bills in the state legislature could make preserving this history easier.
Senate Bill S8903 would help identify and memorialize people buried in mental health hospital cemeteries, many of whom are in unmarked graves.
Senate Bill S4713A would make records from state-run psychiatric facilities public 50 years after a person's death. Right now, they're indefinitely restricted.
Rembis says preservation efforts need to include disabled people and include critical conversations about how preservation — including buildings that used to be asylums — honors the lives of those who were institutionalized. Some survivors are still alive.
Michael Rembis: I think it's helpful to have folks with that kind of lived experience and those connections to the past to really think ethically and engage responsibly with this material, and to really foreground their lives and their experiences.
And many of these institutions persisted into the 20th century, into the 21st century.
Emyle Watkins: Before we left, I asked Patricia what she feels she learned from this photo of her great-grandmother.
Patricia Watkins: She was at a good place in her young life, and I think she was newly married in that photo. So all was going well for her. She had the world at her fingertips.
Emyle Watkins: For more on this story, visit our website at btpm.org. I'm Emyle Watkins. Thanks for listening.
