I wanted to share some images and the artist statement from my recent show at a local coffee shop. Just took it down Tuesday.

Statement: The most important aspect of the Mad Pride Movement to me, as an artist, is remembering the humanity of grief, trauma, and suffering. Generations of wisdom around grieving have been shut down and silenced, the ways we used to hold one another in suffering have been forgotten.

The #MadPride movement is a movement of current and former patients of psychiatry and their loved ones attempting to change the context within which we view madness and reimagine a mental health care system that embraces diversity and recovery of our own definition…

Everything we perceive changes by how we define it. Like art that changes within the context it is displayed, human experiences and consciousnesses do the same – including what we define as madness. Not that long ago, African slaves who desired freedom from bondage were diagnosed with mental illness. Witches (or medicine women), too. In many ways, the definition serves someone, not always the person on which the label is attached.

Altered states (or psychosis, as it is called in a clinical setting), unique beliefs (or delusions), grief and sadness (or depression), trauma and stress responses (or anxiety and many other diagnostic labels) – become something else when you change the story and the environment they exist within. Change the culture, institution, spiritual or philosophical context – remove it from the biomedical model, and madness can become…meaningful.

Nature’s most profound and fundamental mechanism for life is diversity. The radical changes in our culture around diversity do not end with race. Recognizing and embracing the diversity of how each of us grieve loss, face suffering, how each of us find (or don’t find) joy within our lives as they are prescribed – the diversity of experience, consciousness, personality, and culturally defined limitations like disability and mental distress need tending, too.