Elegies for Our Lost Asylums, with Christopher Payne and Anna

Elegies for Our Lost Asylums, with Christopher Payne and Anna Schuleit 8 pm, Wednesday, September 29 Tishman Auditorium, The New School 66 West 12th Street, NYC CHRISTOPHER PAYNE's photography has artfully documented America's vanishing architecture and industrial landscape. His new book, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals (with an essay by Oliver Sacks) follows a 7-year exploration of America's vast and largely abandoned state mental institutions. The New York Times called Asylum one of the best art books of 2009 and Dwell called it "astoundingly beautiful work on a subject that rarely gets the attention." Trained as an architect, Payne is a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. ANNA SCHULEIT's early, large-scale installation projects revolved around psychiatric institutions: "Habeas Corpus" used the hallways and rooms of the abandoned Northampton State Hospital like the insides of an instrument for a performance of J.S. Bach's Magnificat. "Bloom" consisted of 28,000 potted, blooming flowers throughout four floors of the at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Art Forum recently named "Bloom" one of the 10 outstanding art works in history. A 2006 MacArthur Fellow, Schuleit was trained at the Rhode Island School of Design.