1 – Postcard, ca. 1920, of the entrance gate to State Hospital Number 3, in rural Nevada, Missouri, featuring the giant eagle sculpture depicted in Edward Deeds’s drawings.
On June 7, 1936, a slender twenty-eight-year-old man with a ninth-grade education entered a massive, eight-wing brick structure in Nevada, Missouri. In its design and scale, this building would have fit in perfectly well in nineteenth-century London. It was as if the Victoria and Albert Museum had been set down on the outskirts of this small town in western Missouri. [Figs. 1, 2, 3] Except that it wasn’t a museum. It was a hospital for the mentally ill. The man’s name was James Edward Deeds Jr. He was admitted to State Hospital Number 3 in Nevada with a diagnosis of “dementia praecox.” He was one of about seventeen hundred patients who lived in that building, some for a few months, some for years, some until they died. James Edward Deeds Jr., called Edward by his family, would reside at State Hospital Number 3 for the next thirty-seven years. He would begin his residency during the height of the Great Depression and continue it through the first moon landing. He would know no other life than inside the walls of institutions. He would never marry, never father children, never own a house or a car, never travel, never walk through the world freely.
1 – Postcard, ca. 1920, of the entrance gate to State Hospital Number 3, in rural Nevada, Missouri, featuring the giant eagle sculpture depicted in Edward Deeds’s drawings.
2 – Double postcard of the massive State Hospital Number 3. It was the largest building west of the Mississippi when it opened in 1887.
3 – Postcard of the reception hall of State Hospital Number 3. The goal of the asylum was to create a home and a haven for people suffering from mental illness.
Yet, Deeds created an entire mysterious, enduring world with pen, pencil, crayons, and the discarded pages of a hospital ledger—and with his own unconfined imagination.
Edward Deeds and his art would have disappeared from history—and, in fact, until just recently, did—if it hadn’t been for the scavenging eye of a fourteen-year-old boy. Walking down a street in a residential section of Springfield, Missouri, one day in 1970, the boy spotted something in a trash heap. It was a worn, dull portfolio made of leather and cardboard. Its green and grayish cover had a patina of age and use. The boy pulled it from the trash. In it was something that must have astonished and befuddled him: 283 drawings that had been stitched crudely but resolutely into the book, along with three loose drawings. He would have immediately seen that the drawings were made on ledger paper labeled “State Hospital No. 3.” There was no indication of who had made these drawings; there was no name on the book. They were strange yet purposeful, drawn with a fastidious delicacy. The boy had certainly never seen anything like them. No one had.
What did he make of the many drawings of large-eyed men and women staring straight at him as if they were transfixed, yet somehow not threatening? They were dressed in clothes he might have seen in black-and-white nineteenth-century formal photographs. What did he think of the drawings of animals, some drawn accurately, some awkwardly? Some were familiar—dogs, cats, ducks, and squirrels. Some he had only seen in books or in the zoo or at the circus—tigers, lions, elephants, and camels. He saw drawings of steamboats, smoke billowing out of smokestacks, and of old cars he might have seen in silent films on TV. He saw clocks and fans, factory-like buildings and landscapes dotted with slim, tall trees. There was a baseball team in old-fashioned uniforms that might have especially caught his eye. There was a Wild West show.
The pages were all numbered by hand, but there didn’t seem to be any order to the drawings. Some of the titles of the drawings were misspelled: Bool Frog, Rucian, Professer, Wo Mule, and Southern Hotell. He could see no reason why one drawing came after another. Nothing really happened in this book. There was no story. Some of the people had names, but nobody said anything. What was this? The boy had no idea that the man who made these drawings, Edward Deeds, was alive and living about one hundred miles away.
Something prompted the boy to take the battered portfolio home with him. Was it the benign calmness that emanated from the book? The simple oddness of it? Or was it that he knew somehow that this was a person’s life’s effort, a world that had been created with deliberation, care, and skill, and that leaving it there in the trash would have been wrong? We know the boy did, in fact, take the book home. He kept it for thirty-six years.
When he examined the contents more closely, he would have tallied sixty portraits of women and girls, many holding small, pretty posies and often wearing elaborate hats with fat plumes. If the women were without hats, their long hair was inevitably parted precisely in the middle, streaming darkly and thickly behind each shoulder. He would have counted fifty-two portraits of men and boys, twenty-three of steamboats, six of early automobiles, and four of wood- or coal-fired trains. He saw factories with “Cotton Gin,” “Silver Smith,” and “Millionery Store” written on them by hand, the bricks of the squarish buildings drawn one by one, with near-scientific care. He turned the pages and saw airy drawings of watches and saw blades.
If there was one thing that these humans and animals, objects and landscapes had in common, it was that they all seemed to come from the world of his grandparents or great-grandparents. Through the ensuing years he would live with those drawings’ many enigmas, not the least of which was: Who made them, and why?
In 2006 he decided, at last, to sell the album of drawings. We don’t know exactly why. He contacted retired Missouri State University professor Dr. Lyndon Irwin, and Professor Irwin placed a few of the drawings on his website. A Kansas book dealer happened upon them and alerted his constituency. There was immediate interest from other dealers and collectors. The album of drawings was sold and then sold again. It eventually found its way into the hands of a New York City artist and collector, Harris Diamant. He had seen the drawings online and was instantly taken with them.
The boy—now a man, of course—who found the drawings? To further add to the unorthodoxy of this story, he has chosen to withdraw from its unfolding. In short, he’s disappeared. We can only thank him for his faith and constancy and grant him his anonymity.
Harris Diamant, who, like everyone else, had no idea who the maker of these drawings was, gave him the name “the Electric Pencil,” from the title of drawing number 197. Intrigued, Diamant was determined to find who the Electric Pencil was. He hired a detective in Missouri and placed articles and notices in a Springfield, Missouri, newspaper, with the story of the drawings and a call for anyone with information to please contact him.
By chance, one of Deeds’s nieces, Julie Phillips, read one of the articles. From looking at reproductions of the drawings, she realized that this must be her Uncle Edward. Julie and her sister, Juanita, were the daughters of Edward’s younger brother, Clay. Clay and his family would visit Edward once every four to six weeks at State Hospital Number 3. (Edward’s mother would visit, too, but never his father.) Our knowledge of Deeds comes from Diamant’s interviews with his nieces and subsequent research, along with Deeds’s hospital records, released at his nieces’ request, and other digging.
It is also because of the nieces that we have a few photographs of Edward Deeds, the Electric Pencil. In one, a slim man in a dark suit and short plaid tie stands on the hospital lawn, leaning forward, mouth agape. He is balding, with large ears, nose, and eyes. He looks straight at the camera, nearly blankly, much as the subjects of his portraits look at us. His hands are curled, his arms hang limply at his sides. [Fig. 4] This is the man who made the drawings that, for all their oddness and eccentricity, have many moments of delicate, soft precision, have an artistic vision. What does that say about what’s inside all of us that can’t be revealed in any photograph?
4 – Edward Deeds (left), with his younger brother, Clay Deeds, during a visit on the hospital grounds in 1944.
James Edward Deeds Jr. was born in 1908. [Fig. 5] He grew up on a farm in southwestern Missouri on the fringes of the Ozark Mountains, where he was the oldest of five children, three girls and two boys. From the beginning, he had difficulties learning. He was possibly autistic, and later, at State Hospital Number 3, it was determined he had an IQ just under eighty. He liked to spend time outdoors, in nature. His father, an authoritarian, wanted Edward to pull his weight on the farm. Edward resisted. This was a source of constant strife between the two, and so Edward became the object of his father’s fierce anger. He would beat Edward “almost to death,” as a niece put it.1
5 – Edward Deeds, age seven. Edward had a stormy childhood and was in conflict with his abusive father.
When physical force didn’t work, Edward was made to live alone in a cabin on the farm’s property, away from the main house, on the edge of a small river. What damage was done to Edward Deeds by his father? How much of Edward’s dream world was there from the beginning, and how much emerged on paper as a refuge from the violence he faced in childhood and the loneliness he would encounter later?
One day Edward threatened his younger brother, Clay, with a hatchet—it’s not clear whether this was a serious gesture or a prank. That was enough. Deeds’s father decided to send Edward away to the State School for the Feeble Minded in Marshall, Missouri, some three hours north of the farm. When Edward heard that he was going to be sent to Marshall and that he would be taken from his family, whom he truly loved, he tried to kill himself by drinking antifreeze. Now, Edward would be completely alone among strangers. He was twenty-five.
He spent three years in the state school. Then, in 1936, he was labeled “insane” by the school—and therefore beyond its capabilities—and transferred to the massive State Hospital Number 3 in Nevada, Missouri, which had been built in 1887.
While we may think of mental hospitals of the nineteenth century as barbaric, for a while, at least in the United States, that wasn’t the case. This was due in part to a compassionate Pennsylvania Quaker doctor named Thomas Kirkbride. Born in 1809, Kirkbride was a determined advocate for the humane treatment of the mentally ill. He founded the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane—the future American Psychiatric Association—and his influence was wide-ranging. Kirkbride’s philosophy was that the mentally ill should be treated with kindness and respect. His reasons were not just moral but practical. “Of the recent cases of insanity, properly treated,” he wrote, “between 80 and 90 percent recover.”2 A major part of his plan was contained in the design of the buildings where these patients would live. In 1854 he published On the Construction, Organization and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane. It’s a remarkable book.
No aspect of the hospital’s design escaped his attention or failed to embody his concern for his patients’ welfare, down to the water pipes, dust flues, and even the clothes hampers. His hospital would accommodate a maximum of 250 patients. “I know of no reason,” he wrote in his book, “why an individual who has the misfortune to become insane, should, on that account, be deprived of any comfort or even luxury, that is not improper or injurious.…Everything repulsive and prison-like should be carefully avoided.”3 The building should be situated so that “the prevailing winds of summer may also be made to minister to the comfort of the inmates.”4 He considered every detail of the institution: “The floors of all patients’ rooms, without exception, should be made of well seasoned wood.…There should be three marble or enameled cast iron wash basins in one section of the bath room.…The urinals should also be made of cast iron, well enameled, with a downward current of air through them.”5
He even had an objection to the language and terms associated with the mentally ill: “‘Lunacy’ and ‘lunatic’ are terms,” he wrote, “which have no meaning in reference to the diseases of the mind, and originated from a popular belief in influences that have long since been shown to have no existence.”6 Nearly one hundred hospitals across the United States were built according to the Kirkbride plan—at no little cost, which makes this even more astonishing. One of them is St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, where one of our most famous poets was kept for twelve years, declared insane—Ezra Pound.
By the time Edward Deeds entered State Hospital Number 3, however, conditions had begun to deviate from Kirkbride’s original specifications. Instead of 250 patients, the hospital population had burgeoned to some 1,700 souls. Set on 520 rich acres of land, the institution was self-sustaining. [Fig. 6] It had its own cows, chickens, and hogs that supplied milk, eggs, and meat. It grew its own vegetables. Every patient worked, some even as butchers. (Imagine the faith the staff must have had in the knife-wielding inmates.) Edward Deeds first worked in the fields and later at a more agreeable job for him, in the laundry room.
6 – Double postcard of the campus of State Hospital Number 3, featuring gardens, shade trees, and stately drives.
No one knows when Edward Deeds began to draw or why. The beginning of his drawing might well have coincided with a drastic change in the way patients with mental problems were treated in America. The 1950s brought the advent of tranquilizers such as Thorazine as a major part of the treatment of those afflicted. With those drugs also came electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)—commonly known as shock therapy. A 1952 report by a psychologist working at State Hospital Number 3 is somewhat horrifying; the so-called therapies employed at the time included “Electric shock therapy; Metrazol and Insulin Shock Therapy; Fever Therapy; Hydo-Therapy; and Prefrontal Lobotomy.” Last, and what appears to be least, was psychotherapy. The report goes on to say:
Electric shock therapy is at the present time the most widely used form of treatment for mentally ill patients.…In the treatment a carefully regulated electric current is passed instantaneously through the brain, causing a reaction.…In this Hospital, Electric Shock Therapy is administered on a twice weekly basis or more or less frequently as the individual patient’s condition warrants.7
Brynnan K. Light-Lewis, in her study of Deeds’s life and art, describes what happened to Edward Deeds:
While incarcerated at the State Hospital, Deeds was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy, a biomedical treatment in which an electric current is administered to a patient’s brain. In the original method, known as sine-wave bilateral ECT, which is still widely used today, electrodes are placed on the scalp over each temporal region. In unilateral ECT, a single electrode is placed over the non-dominant hemisphere. The electric current induces a controlled convulsive seizure in an attempt to alleviate symptoms of psychiatric disorders.8
This brings us to one of the most poignant drawings in the album, number 33. It depicts a man with a smallish top hat and a sideways look, large nose, and thick lips. Below are written two words, in capital letters: WHY. DOCTOR. It also brings us back to drawing number 197 and the words written above a portrait of a feather-hatted lady pointing to a bouquet of flowers: ectlectrc and, in smaller letters on an angle to the side, pencil. Harris Diamant speculates that the misspelling of electric is not actually a misspelling at all, but rather a kind of cryptogram, with the letters ECT, twice rendered in the word, standing for “electroconvulsive therapy.” The letters ECT can be found elsewhere: in drawing number 94, where they appear on the face of a multiwindowed building, and in drawing number 95, below a portrait of a man wearing a fedora. Beneath the portrait is a cigar-shaped object, which Diamant speculates might be a device put in patients’ mouths when they were given shock therapy so they wouldn’t bite their tongues when convulsed.
With that brave new world of therapies, Edward Deeds’s life changed in State Hospital Number 3. On the one hand, he would have been stupefied daily with sedatives. Then, probably twice a week, he would have been subjected to massive jolts of electricity to his cortex. In between these two seemingly contradictory therapies, each brutal in its own way, he would have experienced long periods of nothing. A mental hospital does not have a social director on a constant mission to stimulate and entertain people; there are hours and hours of sitting and staring, of a listlessness that encourages still more listlessness.
Draw Edward Deeds did, though. He drew meticulously wrought pictures on “State Hospital No. 3” ledger paper that had once belonged to a “J. R. Walton, Treasurer.” At the bottom of the page, in blunt, small type, is printed “Balance Due us, $.” But what we see on these pages has nothing to do with money, with accounts due. What we see are vines curling around trellises then bursting into petite yellow, pink, and lavender flowers; a solitary lion and tiger looking right at us like a pencil-rendered version of Edward Hicks’s Peaceable Kingdom; we see a dandy in tails with the snappy title Hello.Kid; we see an opened fan, its bands as consistently and finely rendered as a chambered nautilus; we see an almost effervescent hot-air balloon, its tether trailing downward like an afterthought; we see five full-length portraits of ladies in fashionable ankle-length dresses.
In fact, the men and women in Deeds’s world are always dressed in their best. They all seem ready to attend some sort of formal or celebratory affair—perhaps a dance or an afternoon tea or a voyage somewhere or a church service. No one in Deeds’s world is slovenly, crude, aggressive, or ugly. No one is mocked, lampooned. No one hurt or damaged. There are no deaths. It is a picturesque, orderly world. If this is a manifestation of his subconscious, then he must have been a kind-hearted man. He was someone who, despite his bleak surroundings and his hard background, created a serene, sweet world. For the most part, it’s a world of individuals—people, animals, cars, trains, and steamboats are rendered uniquely. This, like all art, is the creation of a single spirit. It’s a world of “real toads in imaginary gardens,” as the poet Marianne Moore put it. This is where Edward Deeds truly and fully lived. This manifests the strength of art.
Here, in this atmosphere of boredom and loneliness, Deeds began to draw not the life around him but a world he had never experienced. What era is this? What time in American history? It’s clearly not the 1930s, when Deeds entered the hospital. Nor is it the 1920s. It’s earlier. The clues are in the automobiles and in, of all things, the shoes. Scot Keller, chief curator of LeMay–America’s Car Museum in Tacoma, Washington, commented on scans of the six automobiles Deeds drew:
The singular shot [drawing number 6] looks to be pure imagination. The shapes and lines don’t look like any car that we recognize. [Drawing number 2] has some elements of the [Ford] Model T but, given the sheer number of cars built in that time period, it is natural that a drawing would use some T elements. [Drawing number 47] is a fairly accurate depiction of…many cars of that era, but there isn’t enough to identify it as a specific brand.9
Henry Ford began producing his iconic Model T in 1908 and stopped in the 1920s.
It’s the shoes that help most in terms of trying to pin down the time of Deeds’s world. H. Kristina Haugland, associate curator of costume and textiles at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, looked at drawing number 89, which Deeds titled Miss Ausburn, and drawing number 151, which he labeled At the Garden Gate, both full-length portraits of women in plumed hats and long-sleeved, ankle-length dresses:
The two images feature rather idiosyncratic dress that seems to be from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century but is not specifically datable to a particular time. The footwear, however, is very detailed; as Nancy E. Rexford’s book Women’s Shoes in America, 1795–1930 makes clear, footwear styles can be fairly easy to date. Judging from the shoes, and consistent with everything else in the images, I would say that the images may date to the first decade of the twentieth century. (This is also in keeping with the shape of the torso of the woman in profile, which seems to have the “monobosom” look prevalent in the years around 1905.)10
So: 1900 to 1910, more or less. In addition, Deeds drew quite a few steamboats, and we know that steamboats plied the Mississippi into the early part of the twentieth century. The one figure Deeds drew that seems to have a counterpart in real life—Champ Clark, a member of the US Congress, depicted in drawing number 157—lived until 1921.
In the end, the most important aspect of this era is that it was not Edward Deeds’s era. It was the world that flourished at the time of his birth and perhaps ten or fifteen years before and after. It’s a world of imagined nostalgia. The fact that it doesn’t really exist in any specific historical context is the point. Lady Smith, Lady York, Miss Winterstine, Miss Snider, Miss Fanny, and all the other men and women he names may somewhere exist in fashion, theater, local history, or literature. But where they certainly do exist, and will always exist, is on the pages Deeds created. This is a world of the imagination. The moment we relinquish the desire to find “real” counterparts to Edward Deeds’s men and women, landscapes, trains, and cars is the moment we elevate Edward Deeds’s work from some kind of curiosity to art.
There are some mysteries, though—some tantalizing things in these drawings that we can’t avoid. The twenty-three steamboats he drew, for example, came from somewhere we don’t know. The closest river to State Hospital Number 3 was the 102-mile-long Marmaton, too narrow for steamboat travel. The river near his boyhood home, the Finley, is even smaller. It’s not a great leap, though, to think of that most famous of Missouri towns, known throughout the world—Hannibal. And to remember Mark Twain’s excited evocation of steamboats and the majestic joy they brought to his world. Steamboats glorify both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. Had Edward Deeds read Huckleberry Finn (or had it read to him)? In any case, it would be nearly impossible to grow up in Missouri without some idea of the role steamboats played in the state’s history. How could you escape the infectious romanticism?
In the end, though, Edward Deeds’s iconography will probably remain as private and elusive as the man himself.
Edward Deeds drew with pen, pencil, and crayon. His palette was limited. His favorite color was green—a faint, lightly assertive shade of green. He also employed soft, muted yellows, reds, blues, and browns. We don’t know if this was by choice or by necessity. His mother would bring him crayons when she visited, but we don’t know the range of hues. In fact, the most prominent colors in the portfolio are pencil-gray and black. Deeds’s coloring is often subtle, not to mention his draftsmanship. You can miss this at first if your eye is waylaid by the small-pupiled, big-eyed men and women staring straight at you hypnotically. But look at drawing number 87, called Miss. Arnnell—look at the stream-like accentuations on her dress, the intricacy of the hem, the chevron-shaped flower arrangement. Look at the peacock’s vivid eyes in drawing number 30; the minuscule minutes of the watch face in drawing number 63; the fretless yellow banjo in 72, its strings angled ever so slightly inward from the bridge; the horse’s hooves, driver’s snappy hat and parabola-shaped whip in midair in 122; look at the Le Nôtre–like formal garden in 144; the back legs of the frowning frog in 228; the surely linked anchor chains in 262.
It’s good to remember that these are drawings, not paintings. Their pleasures are those we receive from viewing drawings, and those pleasures are not the same as those we receive viewing paintings. Sometimes when we look at the drawings of famous painters, we seem to be looking at the work of a different artist. The limited range of colors is what often makes the work so wonderful: how much these artists can render from so little. We understand that what the pen and pencil can do, the brush can’t.
His nieces knew their uncle liked to draw, but neither they nor Clay Deeds knew he had created anything like the album’s 283 drawings—and possibly more. He looked forward to the visits from Clay, his wife, Martaun, and their daughter Juanita. [Figs. 7, 8] We know he was despondent when they left. We can imagine him afterward walking back to his room. We can imagine the comfort he had putting pencil or crayon to paper, the reassurance and affirmation of creating, assuaging despair and loneliness. He was drugged and shocked, yet look what he created! Look at the peaceable Midwest kingdom, the docile Henri Rousseau–like world of tigers, plumed hats, and wispy trees. How can you not think of the haven art can provide and of its determination to be revealed? Or of the beauty and strength of the human spirit? “The violets in the mountains,” as Tennessee Williams wrote, “have broken the rocks.”
7 – Clay Deeds (left) visiting his brother, Edward Deeds. The family made the trip every few weeks, often picnicking on the grounds of the hospital.
8 + 9 – Clay’s wife, Martaun Smith Deeds. Family identified Edward Deeds’s “Miss. Martin” (drawing number 64) as a portrait of his sister-in-law.
Sometime in the mid-1960s, Deeds decided to give the album he had made of his drawings to his mother. Arthritis had made it difficult for him to draw. We don’t know what she thought of her son’s handiwork. We know she loved him, was loyal to him, cared about him. However, when she became infirm and was moved to a nursing home, she gave the album to her other son, Clay, who placed it in his attic. Clay and his family eventually moved from their home in Springfield, and, during the transition, Clay mistakenly told the movers they could take whatever they wanted from the attic. The movers cleaned the space out, and, seeing no use for an album of strange drawings, they tossed it in a trash heap on the side of the road. The drawings shouldn’t have been found. But they were.
How will Edward Deeds’s work be viewed, classified, appreciated, now that it’s in the world? Deeds will be inevitably—has been already—referred to as an “outsider artist.” He will be discussed alongside other outsider artists such as James Castle, Henry Darger, Martín Ramírez, and Howard Finster.
The idea of “outsider art”—although certainly not the actual practice—has its modern origins with Jean Dubuffet, who called it art brut, writing:
By this we mean pieces of work executed by people untouched by artistic culture, in which therefore mimicry, contrary to what happens in intellectuals, plays little or no part, so that their authors draw everything (subjects, choice of materials employed, means of transposition, rhythms, ways of writing, etc.) from their own depths and not from clichés of classical art or art that is fashionable. Here we are witnessing an artistic operation that is completely pure, raw, reinvented in all its phases by its author, based solely on his own impulses.11
Many artists probably wouldn’t have been discovered or exhibited were it not for this classification that has allowed art critics and gallery owners to feel secure in buying and selling such nonclassic art. The famous outsider artist Martín Ramírez, who spent thirty-two years in California mental hospitals, left a legacy remarkably close to what Edward Deeds has left us, from nearly the same origins. Ramírez was institutionalized in 1931, just five years earlier than Deeds, first in California’s Stockton State Hospital and later in the DeWitt State Hospital. New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl offers illuminating words in describing him, words that can just as well apply to James Edward Deeds:
Outsider art—lately euphemized as “self-taught,” a vapid label that inconveniently describes originality in general—comes from and goes nowhere in art history. (The outsider is a culture of one.) It defeats normal criticism’s tactics of context and comparison. It is barbaric. Can we skirt the imbroglio and regard Ramírez as an ordinary artist with extraordinary qualities?…What is it like to be an outsider? Outside what? Ramírez worked cogently from within his memory, imagination, and talent. He also belonged to an actual culture, that of a mid-century American mental hospital.…He surely suffered, but his subject was an accessible happiness.12
It might be well to eliminate the term outsider artist and refer to Edward Deeds as, in Schjeldahl’s words, “a culture of one.” We may know what the term outsider art means, but doesn’t outside have a negative concept? If we’re going to use any term at all, it might be more appropriate to call the drawings of Edward Deeds “insider art.” He created his art inside an institution. He was never outside.
On January 12, 1973, having been declared no longer a danger to self and to others, James Edward Deeds Jr. was transferred from State Hospital Number 3 to the Christian County Nursing Home in Ozark, Missouri, not far from the farm where he grew up. He died fourteen years later, on January 9, 1987, at the age of seventy-eight. He’s buried nearby.
State Hospital Number 3 was closed in 1991 and torn down in 1999. Thomas Kirkbride’s great plan for the welfare of the mentally ill may have been altered by modern drugs and machines. But even under that assault, Edward Deeds managed, through his sweet, enigmatic art, not only, in Faulkner’s words, to endure, but to prevail.
1Brynnan K. Light-Lewis, “The Deeds of Outsider Art” (master’s thesis, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, 2012), 8, http://www.electricpencildrawings.com/pdf/thesis.pdf.
2Thomas S. Kirkbride, On the Construction, Organization and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane (Philadelphia: s.n., 1854), 2.
3Ibid., 5, 12.
4Ibid., 12.
5Ibid., 16, 20, 21.
6Ibid., 73.
7The First One Hundred Years of Mental Health Services, 1885–1985: Nevada State Hospital and Nevada Habilitation Center (Nevada, MO: s.n., 1985), 46–48.
8Light-Lewis, 44.
9Scot Keller, e-mail to author, January 15, 2015.
10Kristina Haugland, e-mail to author, January 28, 2015.
11Jean Dubuffet, “L’art brut préféré aux arts culturels” (Paris: Galerie René Drouin, 1949).
12Peter Schjeldahl, “Mystery Train,” New Yorker, January 29, 2007, 88–89.
I would like to thank Neville Bean, Kristina Haugland, and Scot Keller for their help in researching the art and life of Edward Deeds. I’d like to thank Deborah Attoinese, John Hazlett, and Alex Jones for their encouragement. I want to especially thank Leslie Staub for her apt, insightful comments and suggestions and for a haven in which to write.
—Richard Goodman
Richard Goodman is the author of French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France, The Soul of Creative Writing, A New York Memoir, and The Bicycle Diaries: One New Yorker’s Journey Through 9/11. He has written for the New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Harvard Review, River Teeth, Chautauqua, Vanity Fair, Ascent, French Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction writing at the University of New Orleans. His website is www.richardgoodman.org.
