Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

January 20, 2025

From 18 January to 4 May 2025, the CPW in Kingston, New York, presents Mary Ellen Mark’s seminal Ward 81 – complemented by unseen archive material and newly discovered audio files. 
In 1975, while photographing on the set of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Mary Ellen Mark (1940–2015) encountered some of the patients being treated in the high-security wing of the Oregon State Psychiatric Hospital in Salem, where the movie was filmed.

One year later, she returned to embark on a self-assigned project, documenting the experiences of the women in Ward 81 in collaboration with author and sociologist, Dr. Karen Folger Jacobs. 

For 36 days, Mark and Jakobs lived on-site, gaining extraordinary access to patients and staff. Their resulting book, Ward 81 (published in 1978) was a nuanced and compelling record of female psychiatric treatment in the US at that time, and revealed the often porous line between sanity and mental illness for women relegated to the margins of society.

The exhibition at the Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) is complemented by never-before-seen prints, contact sheets and rare archive material. Most exciting are the newly discovered audio narratives that the women recorded with Jacobs, which have been integrated into a short film, Moonlight Heaven Black, made for the exhibition by the photographer’s husband, Martin Bell.

The original exhibition was curated by Gaëlle Morel and Kaitlin Booher for the Image Centre, Toronto, in collaboration with the Mary Ellen Mark Foundation, New York. It is accompanied by the publication Ward 81: Voices by Mary Ellen Mark and Karen Folger Jacobs, edited by Martin Bell, Julia Bezgin and Meredith Lue (Steidl Publishing, 2023).
Katrin Ullmann
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Over the Cuckoo’s Nest