Snakes slither across the lace’s surface. Look closely and you can see a dove, a bee, and several turtles. It’s fabulous-the more you look, the more you see.” MacGregor describes the lacework as “a masterpiece of miniaturism.” “I like things that are microscopic,” he says, “and Hall’s piece just draws you further in and further in. Another is wearing a Masonic hat and holding a trumpet. One of these figures also happens to be a skeleton. Figures Hall identified as both male and female, for instance, possess male genitalia-in each case with the testicles placed above the penis. Hall’s piece of lace is both disturbing and fascinating, naive and, in its own eccentric way, remarkably sophisticated. It had been Hall’s bad luck to enter the institution-twice-in off years. Elizabeths’ old patient records would be destroyed-except for those of persons admitted during years ending in a 5 or 0. But there the biographical trail went cold: Because of an inexplicable bureaucratic whim, sometime during the ’70s, it was decided that St. With the help of the article, MacGregor learned that the lace had been made in 1917 by a patient of Evarts’ named Adelaide V. Evarts that appeared in the October 1918 issue of the Psychoanalytic Review. I told them right away that I wanted to photograph it and write about it.”Īccompanying the work was a yellowing file card that bore the words “Patient Art,” as well as a reference to an article by Dr. But MacGregor says he knew “immediately that it was an extremely important piece of outsider art.
To the uninformed, this bit of white cotton might have been mistaken for a rather embarrassing family heirloom. Inside a thick, backless wooden frame was a two-sided 9-and-one-half-by-11-and-one-half-inch piece of lacework depicting a group of variously sized figures entrapped in a web. When it was produced, he let out what he recalls as “a spontaneous ‘Wow!’” But on a list of their contents, MacGregor found a reference to a work of art done by a patient of the institution. Elizabeths, which had recently closed its own museum, hadn’t even been unpacked yet. It turned out that the materials from St. Elizabeths”-the massive Southeast Washington mental hospital that since 1855 has housed untold thousands of now-anonymous patients. Then they told him, “But we just got a shipment from St. At first, the museum’s curators told him that no, they had nothing like that.
In 1992, MacGregor was at D.C.’s National Museum of Health and Medicine doing what he does whenever he leaves his San Francisco home: trolling for outsider art. He’s also the man who spent 10 years writing a 720-page book on the late Henry Darger, the reclusive Chicago janitor whose own bizarrely illustrated novel, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, weighs in at some 23,000 words. After all, the Princeton University–trained art historian is the man who, in 1989, published The Discovery of the Art of the Insane, the first cultural history of the art of the mentally ill. MacGregor is used to finding art where no one else has thought to look for it.
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