Psychiatric patients got their own art studios for 40 years

The Living Museum, a working art space inside the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, New York, has given psychiatric patients their own studios for more than four decades. Opened in 1983, it lets patients make paintings, sculptures, and installations, with finished work filling walls, rooms, and exhibition spaces. Individual artists keep their own studios and develop work next to one another. There is also a music studio where albums have been recorded, and they are for sale in the museum store alongside the artwork. Psychologist Janos Marton and artist Bolek Greczynski founded it on a straightforward idea, that people receiving psychiatric care deserve to be recognized for what they make. The result does not feel much like a conventional museum, which was rather the point. Forty years on, the studios are still occupied and the shelves still stock patient records you can take home.