This is a bit of a long post but I found this work so engaging that I wanted to post the story behind it - this is the abridged version.
Lunatic Fringe
Stitching together the life of D.C.’s visionary Lace Maker
By Michael Little • May 21, 2004
"John M. MacGregor is used to finding art where no one else has thought to look for it. 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. 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.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. At first, the museum’s curators told him that no, they had nothing like that. Then they told him, “But we just got a shipment from St. Elizabeths”—the massive Southeast Washington mental hospital that since 1855 has housed untold thousands of now-anonymous patients.It turned out that the materials from St. Elizabeths, which had recently closed its own museum, hadn’t even been unpacked yet. But on a list of their contents, MacGregor found a reference to a work of art done by a patient of the institution.
He asked if he could see it. When it was produced, he let out what he recalls as “a spontaneous ‘Wow!’”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. To the uninformed, this bit of white cotton might have been mistaken for a rather embarrassing family heirloom. But MacGregor says he knew “immediately that it was an extremely important piece of outsider art. I told them right away that I wanted to photograph it and write about it
.”Accompanying the work was a yellowing file card that bore the words “Patient Art,” as well as a reference to an article by Dr. Arrah B. Evarts that appeared in the October 1918 issue of the Psychoanalytic Review. With the help of the article, MacGregor learned that the lace had been made in 1917 by a patient of Evarts’ named Adelaide V. Hall. But there the biographical trail went cold: Because of an inexplicable bureaucratic whim, sometime during the ’70s, it was decided that St. Elizabeths’ old patient records would be destroyed—except for those of persons admitted during years ending in a 5 or 0. It had been Hall’s bad luck to enter the institution—twice—in off years.advertisementHall’s piece of lace is both disturbing and fascinating, naive and, in its own eccentric way, remarkably sophisticated. Figures Hall identified as both male and female, for instance, possess male genitalia—in each case with the testicles placed above the penis. One of these figures also happens to be a skeleton. Another is wearing a Masonic hat and holding a trumpet.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. It’s fabulous—the more you look, the more you see.”Look closely and you can see a dove, a bee, and several turtles. Snakes slither across the lace’s surface. One of them whispers into the ear of a figure Hall called the Woman Picking Up Apples. Another emerges from a cross to suckle at the breast of the woman variously called the One Woman, the Only Woman, and Magdalene. Seen from behind, she has long flowing hair.
Since lacemaking’s origins in 16th-century Europe, its practitioners have sometimes been inspired to include figures in their work. Examples of Italian lace from the 1500s feature sword-carrying horsemen, two-headed eagles, and other imagery understandable to the people for whom they were made. But the meanings behind Hall’s figures weren’t obvious to anyone but the artist.“It’s asymmetrical,” says MacGregor. “Exactly the kind of thing you’d get from a spider that’s been drugged—the work goes crazy. It’s not anything like work that was being done at that time—or any time.”According to the registry of cases for the Government Hospital for the Insane, as St. Elizabeths was called before July 1, 1916, Adelaide V. Hall was first admitted on June 26, 1901, as an “indigent.” The registry states that the artist MacGregor would eventually dub the Lace Maker was a 36-year-old white woman—and that her “form of disease on admission” was “melancholy, simple,” supposedly caused by “worry” of “two and one-half years’ duration.”Hall was a dressmaker by trade, one of the dozens upon dozens listed in the business section of Washington’s City Directory, alongside such tradespeople as drovers, hair workers, bell hangers, artificial-eye makers, and one Roderick Danforth, dealer in “Fluids, Non-Explosive.” Hall told Evarts that she had no recollection of when or how she’d learned to sew. It was, in Evarts’ words, “as if she always knew how.”At that time, a dressmaker might be poor or comfortably middle-class. Her social position, of course, depended on her income—which in turn depended, according to National Museum of American History social-history specialist Patricia Q. Wood, “on her skill level, her contacts, how hard she worked. One has to be careful to think of the dressmakers of that time being lower-class. Some dressmakers did very well—to the extent that they sent their children to college.”As for the quality of Hall’s dressmaking, it’s impossible to tell: Her work has long since turned to dust. But she appears to have done well enough.,
As for Hall, she was apparently happy to explain her handiwork to her therapist. Some of her explanations were as cryptic as the art itself, but a story emerged nonetheless: about a woman who desired to be simultaneously a virgin and a mother, and whose desire for a marriage with God the Father was a sign of traumatic childhood experiences.Each of the many figures in Hall’s lacework has a role to play in telling this story. The smaller figures include the Virgin Mary; a character who represents both St. Michael and St. Joseph; the Children of the Abbey, whom Adelaide alternately defined as a “whole race of little people” and “the Jews”; and Mr. Gibson, whom Evarts identified as one of Hall’s “early paramours,” and hence all of her other lovers, as well.Hall’s work also features several couples. There are, a man and a woman who Hall said “never wore a stitch of clothes.” Then there are a Jack and Jill, Mr. Hill and the Other Woman, and Mr. and Mrs. Hub Smith—all of whom symbolize various types of sexual relationships, from youthful attraction to comfortable middle-aged marriage.
But the most prominent figure is one that Hall referred to by a multitude of names: the One Woman, the Only Woman, Magdalene, the Virgin, the First Woman That Ever Was, the Woman Who Has Suffered All There Is in the World to Suffer Because She Wanted the Christ for a Husband. Though there is a bit of Hall in several of the figures, this last is the one she most strongly identified with. This was her self-portrait.
As her therapy progressed, Hall revealed the cause of her “agony”: a complicated, impossible relationship with her father, who had repeatedly molested her as a child. Outwardly, she expressed feelings of ambivalence toward her old abuser. Inwardly, she wanted to marry him.Appropriately enough for a woman who was to experience more than her fair share of suffering, Hall was born into the musket fire of the Civil War and died mere months after the only war decided by atomic weapons. Her exact date of birth is unknown: Freeman, “It will be a hell of a long while before I’ll let you operate on any of my patients.” But when White died, in 1937, many of his approaches died with him.We’ll never know what treatments Hall underwent subsequently. Nor will we know whether she ever received any visitors—though she did outlive most of her known Washington-area relations. Her sisters Martha Heath and Mary Florence Hall died in 1921 and 1917, respectively. Martha’s daughter Lily died in 1917, as well. It’s possible that one or more of Martha’s three sons, or her daughter Nellie, went occasionally to see their aunt. records—Hall got lucky: Someone cared enough to bury her in the Heath family plot at Glenwood Cemetery on Lincoln Road NE. The grave of Adelaide V. Hall, the Woman Who Has Suffered All There Is in the World to Suffer Because She Wanted the Christ for a Husband, is unmarked.
