This exhibit opened in June 2007 and featured a new series of paintings by Rachel Herrick addressing the past, present and future of North Carolina ’s mental health care system. Herrick worked in cooperation with Dix Hospital for a year to explore the hospital’s campus and capture the evocative remains of its architecture as a kind of cultural landscape. 25% of sales from the exhibit were donated to the Wake County branch of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI-Wake). After the close of the gallery exhibit the remaining paintings were exhibited at the NC Psychiatry Association annual conference and were part of the Art Ability exhibit at Bryn Mawr College, PA. Most of the paintings have been sold. A few remain in Herrick's collection.

exhibition statement

Dorothea Dix Hospital is closing after 150 years of treating North Carolina ’s mentally ill. Many of the buildings already sit quiet and empty. Their wide, dirty windows, empty staircases and rotten moldings are crumbling architectural reminders of the care that went into planning the hospital and the great optimism of its original mission to heal the insane.

Today hardly anyone can remember what the original use of any given building was. Over the years Dix’s landscape has shifted and bent to meet the needs of the ever-growing flood of patients. One former physician described working at Dix as wading through “seas of obstacles.” Over-extended and under-funded, mental health providers appear shell-shocked when asked about their work—an expression echoed on the faces of patients and their families.

The buildings and the people are exhausted, yet continue in their good intentions and willingness to do whatever it takes to ease suffering.

This art is meant to be evocative of the troubled and complex history of mental health care at Dorothea Dix, and provocative about the future. Is there something to be learned from the ruin of this old hope?