Okay. Remember last month when I found a bunch of tattered art works at a local estate sale and fell into an obsessive hyperfixation to figure out who the artist was and what happened to her?
Here’s a tiny recap in case you have the same memory problems I do.
The art works were from the 1950s and were signed L. Perea. They were mostly images from inside of a mental institution and were both brilliant and harrowing. They reminded me of the pieces that Van Gogh had made while in asylums, and it struck me how many people never had an opportunity to tell their story…particularly people who were hidden away in institutions in a time when mental illness was something to be ashamed of or feared. Her art spoke to me because I struggle with mental illness and creating art and writing has saved me over and over. I have family members who died in institutions when mental illness was something to be feared, so in some ways I felt a kinship.
I was really conflicted though, because I wanted to protect her privacy and her family, but also I wanted to break the stigma of shame so that her art her to be seen and her story told. Through research I’ve found she was the last living descendent of her family. (She could have very distant cousins on her mother’s side but none that I’ve found.) I also worried that perhaps she wouldn’t want her art shown, but what I do know is that she created homemade paper frames for almost all of them, and I don’t think you do that with art you don’t want to be seen. I hope I’m right.
So I’m going to tell you her story…the small parts that I’ve been able to discover…and then let her art tell what I think she wanted the rest of the world to know. I hope she’ll be happy about that, wherever she is now.
After I wrote the first blog about Laura I had a chance to return to the home where I bought the art and dug through piles of ephemera to find a few more of her pieces. The owner of the home had been an antique dealer and he couldn’t remember where or when he’d acquired them, so that was a dead end.
It’s actually because of readers here that I found the first thread…Laura Perea, a patient listed as a resident at the local San Antonio State Hospital Mental Institution in the 1950s census. I wasn’t convinced though until I compared this drawing she did in 1955…
…with a photograph from the San Antonio Express showing female patients outside the hospital and recognized the same unique fire-escape stairs in both.
The news story that accompanied the photograph was a horrifying story of severe overcrowding, understaffing and dehumanization…with one psychiatrist for every 280 patients. And it backs up the images from Laura’s art.
Here is what I know of Laura’s story:
Laura’s paternal grandfather was the first hispanic man ordained as a presbyterian pastor (in 1880) and he had a wild life. He rebelled from his wealthy Catholic upbringing in Mexico, ran away to sail the world for 5 years, searched for gold in California, became a shepherd, a missionary, and supported his school-teacher wife in starting a presbyterian school in New Mexico until the local jesuit priests convinced the children that the schoolhouse was possessed by Satan and that Laura’s grandmother “consulted with the devil” each night. The pair started several churches, but personal tragedy followed them.
Their first 5 children all died before age 10 of various illnesses. Their next oldest had a history of mental illness and when he robbed a drug-goods store at age 18 his parents testified that “insanity in his case was hereditary, having a number of very near relatives confined in asylums”. He was committed to the Territorial Hospital for the Insane in Las Vegas. The newspapers at the time blamed his mother for his insanity because she’d witnessed a run-away accident and saw two of her children die of scarlet fever while she was pregnant which made her son insane. (Jesus, patriarchy.) He was later released, but died soon after in a grisly coal train accident, age 24.
The next oldest child started working as an evangelist for Spanish-speaking people, but by at least 1917 (age 26) he’s listed at the Eastern State Hospital for the Insane in Kentucky, where he remained until his death at age 46 in 1938. His death certificate listed what we’d now recognize as a form of schizophrenia.
The only surviving child to enjoy a successful adult life became a language professor and the registrar at Trinity University (in Waxahachie and later San Antonio). His wife gave birth to their only children, twin girls name Helen and Laura, in 1914. The girls excelled in school and both attended college at Trinity University from 1933-1936. In the newspaper stories Laura was recognized for having the highest grades in her class and she graduated summa cum laude of her university, however neither Laura nor her sister were ever named or photographed in any of their college yearbooks. (Possibly because they were both starting to struggle with their mental health?) In the 1940 census Laura and her sister are 26, and are both residents of the West Texas State Hospital for the Insane in Big Spring.
In 1948, Helen dies by suicide at her parents home.
The 1950 census shows Laura living at the San Antonio State Hospital Mental Institution.
The 1960 census hasn’t been made public yet so her history is largely a blank after that. When her last parent dies in 1982, Laura is the only surviving member of the family and so she should have been the next-of-kin informant on the death certificate, but instead it’s an unrelated man who works for a funeral home, which makes me think Laura may have still been institutionalized.
Laura died here in San Antonio in 1995. No known photographs of herself or her sister exist. She was cremated, location of ashes unknown.
I’ve requested a copy of her death certificate but that can take a long time to arrive.
I reached out to various museums who display outsider art because I want them to be seen and I want her story to heard, but no response. But then someone reminded me that I own a bookstore…and that’s why on May 24th we’re going to have our first (and possibly only) art show, where we’ll be displaying Laura’s art at Nowhere Bookshop. Maybe no one will come. Or maybe someone will see her art and be moved, like I have been. The art will be up all day if you want to stop in, and at 5pm we’ll have a casual reception where we can talk about art and mental health. We can explore the symbolism in each piece. We can recognize the forgotten voices and see how very far we’ve come in the treatment of mental illness, and also how far we still have to go. It’s totally free. Come by.
I tried framing them but they lose some of their magic under a glass, so instead (in true outsider-art style) they’ll be raw and unframed and as tattered as they were when I found them. Because in some ways that tells a story as well. If I can get my shit together I’ll have some prints available for sale, with all profits going to NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Health.
And perhaps by then we’ll have more information. The San Antonio Express will be doing a story about the art, and maybe someone who knew Laura will see it and share what she was like.
Until then, we’ll let her art speak for her.
Thank you for listening.