Eighty-Six Reasons for Asylum Admission
Kimberly Chapman
Kimberly Chapman, Gold Masked Women, 2020. Porcelain, glaze, gold luster, 18 x 5 x 4 ½ inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Ohio-based artist Kimberly Chapman creates porcelain sculptures, photographs, and assemblages that confront what women have been made to endure—both historically and in the present. In Eighty-Six Reasons for Asylum Admission, she turns her attention to the legacy of nineteenth-century asylums. The exhibition takes its title from a now-infamous list compiled by the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia: “eighty-six reasons for asylum admission” that expose the deeply gendered logic of institutionalization. A lack of advocacy and control was tied together with pervasive medical misogyny. Drawn from research and driven by a sense of moral urgency, Chapman’s work gives haunting, poetic form to lives lost to silence and confinement.
Organized into thematic groupings, the exhibition invites viewers to encounter a spectrum of narratives and emotional tones. Each work reflects Chapman’s distinctive material language: porcelain objects that balance delicacy and intensity, at once beautiful and unsettling. The show traverses historical trauma and psychological interiority, foregrounding women’s resilience, vulnerability, and defiance.
Eighty-Six Reasons is presented in partnership with the Lipsey Architecture Center of Buffalo, housed within the Richardson Olmsted Campus—Buffalo’s former Kirkbride asylum. While the campus is widely celebrated for its architecture, this exhibition asks us to reckon with the human lives that passed through its halls. Chapman’s work offers a powerful and timely counter-narrative: one that insists on remembrance, accountability, and the need to tell these stories now.
Kimberly Chapman is a sculptor based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her porcelain-based practice focuses on themes of female endurance and institutional violence, frequently drawing from historical research to examine systems that have silenced and subjugated women. Chapman received her BFA in Ceramics from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2017, following a career in corporate and collegiate marketing. She also holds an MA and BA in Communication from Cleveland State 蜜桃传媒.
Since graduating, Chapman has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions across the U.S., including recent solo shows at the National Museum of Psychology in Akron, OH; Erie Museum of Art, Erie, PA: John J. McDonough Museum, Youngstown, OH: and the Baber Gallery at Central Michigan 蜜桃传媒, Mount Pleasant, MI. Her work has been featured in Ceramics Monthly, Cleveland Magazine, CAN Journal, and Canvas. She is a member of the the Ohio Advisory Group to the National Museum of Women in the Arts.