David Byrd

87-year old painter David Byrd has painted incessantly since grade school, and has never before exhibited his work in a commercial gallery. Living and painting by himself in Sidney Center, New York, he had long since resigned himself to a life of invisibility after retiring from his long career as an orderly at a psychiatric Hospital.

Last September, a new neighbor was curious about a driveway filled with random junk carefully arranged, and she worked up the courage to knock on the door. There, she met Mr. Byrd and saw a house filled with hundreds and hundreds of his paintings. There were so many that they were hung three to a single nail. When she took one down, there was another one nested underneath.

The neighbor, Jody Issacson, also a painter, reached out to gallery owners on Byrd's behalf. As a result he is having his first-ever gallery exhibition at Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, where Isaacson also shows. His first show comes 77 years after he attracted attention for his grade-school drawings, more than 60 years since his brief formal art studies, and 25 years after his retirement.

The paintings are astounding, for their sense of narrative, studied poise, and unexpectedly tranquil centers. The surfaces are parched and raw, with a sparse pale palette, bringing forth visions of people Byrd has known, places he has seen, and more than anything else the intense and solitary lives of the people he observed every day at the hospital.

The nearly 100 paintings and sculptures represent work made throughout his life, and span the entire first floor of the Kucera Gallery. Jen Graves wrote a feature article on Byrd for the Stranger, which gives some sense of the unexpected beauty of his work. Seriously - Don't miss this show if you are in Seattle. At the Greg Kucera Gallery, 212 Third Ave S. From now until May 18, and completely free.

Emotional Baggage

In the early 1980's photographer Jon Crispin first came across Willard lunatic asylum, in upstate New York. Crispin immediately wanted to photograph the abandoned 19th-century building and worked for a long time to gain lawful access. Eventually he was allowed to tour the building accompanied; he took a friend along to distract the security guards while he poked around.

Willard was one of several asylums built in response to the campaigning of Dorothea Dix who, in 1841 began a self-funded investigation into treatment of the insane poor. Her efforts forced 20 states nationwide to provide funded care for the mentally ill. Willard was the first to be built for the chronically insane. If you came here, you were unlikely to leave.

Willard’s intake came chiefly from New York City, via a specially built train line. Others arrived by boat from all over the country, docking on Seneca Lake. Patients were kept clean, fed and exercised.
Within eight years, its inmate count of 1,550 made Willard the largest asylum in the country. At its height, this figure reached 4,000.

In 1995, as the building was being prepared for demolition, a local preservationist discovered hundreds of suitcases embalmed in dust and cobwebs in the attic space. The suitcases had belonged to patients who had lived and died there, and were filled with the items each had chosen, or had had chosen for them, when first admitted. 

Acquired by New York State, they were moved into storage and catalogued. Two years ago Crispin was invited to photograph the suitcases and their contents. To date he has photographer around 100, with more than 300 to go. His photographs, along with some of the objects, are embarking on a small museum tour, currently on display at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The best place to see a large array of these gorgeous and haunting images is on Crispin's website.

Films of Nicholas Ray

In 1971, Hollywood director Nicholas Ray was broke and took a teaching job at the State University of New York at Binghamton. His last film, 55 Days at Peking, had been a multimillion-dollar production that nearly killed him, and he didn't attempt to make another film for more than 8 years. Ray's class filled up with ambitious film students thinking they were going to take a directing class from a master, and who instead found themselves enmeshed in a no-budget, high-energy, and extremely confusing wild goose chase titled "We Can't Go Home Again."

Ray's vision for the film involved using multiple images simultaneously as a way of telling complex stories. He called it a “journalistic film... that shares the anthropologist’s aim of recording the history, progress, manners, morals and mores of everyday life.” The film was never completed and never released - until now. The incomplete but fascinating film "We Can't Go Home Again" opens today at the Northwest Film Forum, along with a documentary about the making of the film, "Don't Expect Too Much" by Ray's widow Susan Ray. The documentary goes even deeper into the director's vision, and includes interviews with Ray's students at the time, including Jim Jarmusch.

Ray died in 1979. "We Can't Go Home Again" and "Don't Expect Too Much" screen all this week, Feb 10–16, at Northwest Film Forum. More info and tickets here.