painting
date: label: date made
content: ca 2014
notes: label: Description
content: This watercolor painting was commissioned by Dr. Craig Katz and Dr. Jan Schuetz-Mueller, both psychiatrists on the faculty of the Ichan School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, New York, to illustrate the cover of a book they authored about providing mental health care in a global context. After serving on international disaster relief missions, Katz recognized a need to enhance teaching about mental health issues in a global context. He and Schuetz-Mueller commissioned this painting for their book, entitled "A Guide to Global Mental Health Practice: Seeing the Unseen," published by Routlede in 2015. They asked the painter to depict a man with clinical depression in a community that, in Katz’s words, “has endured a typhoon and civil war and where mental health care is overlooked even under the best of circumstances.”
label: Description
content: Katz became involved in providing mental health care following disasters in New York after helping in the aftermath of a plane crash in 2001 and began a non-profit (www.disasterpsych.org) to provide the volunteer services of psychiatrists after disasters. The organization also developed educational programs, research, and policy work in disaster mental health. Katz was, in his words, particularly “drawn to international work and after responding to the 2004 Southeast Asia tsunami in Sri Lanka, [he] decided that for mental health showing up after a disaster in most places around the world was too little too late.” When Mt. Sinai began a global health program, he introduced mental health development work as a component of the program. His work has included traveling abroad to “to improve access to mental health care for daily life.” Mt. Sinai’s Program in Global Mental Health was established in 2007.
label: Description
content: “The painting,” Katz explained, “was an idea I had and an attempt to be more creative than Medical writing usually allows.” The painting includes seven elements that provide opening vignettes to the book. The image is made-up, but “is drawn from our overseas experiences, especially from work in Liberia,” and is supposed to resemble the sort of image found in a newspaper. Katz and Schuetz-Mueller commissioned the painting in late 2013 and finalized it in early 2014.
label: Description
content: Chase Walker was born in 1988 in Liberia and is a self-taught artist. When he was 12 or 13, his family fled a looming civil war. His mother, he noted, was determined not to stay in Liberia for another war. The family squeezed into a taxi and fled to Ghana where they lived in a refugee camp for 6 years. As a child, Walker had found that creating art, such as by drawing in the sand, was therapeutic. In the refugee camp, there was nothing, he explained, to do, and he refined what he knew about art. When the war ended, Walker asked to go home. The older folks talked, he recalled, and agreed to return home.
label: Description
content: When he returned to Liberia, Walker found that the country had been damaged. The family settled down and started life over and he had to learn about Liberia again. He got a job at a newspaper doing political cartoons. Growing as an artist, he became well-known for drawing cartoons against corruption. He also gained experience doing photography and multimedia work and then received a fellowship at Syracuse University in those fields. In time, an opportunity to do art for a pregnancy guide for illiterate teenag women in Liberia came Walker’s way. Through that project, he met Craig Katz and Jan Schuetz-Mueller. He later explained that understood the impact of wars on the mental health of people who live through them, and he felt that working on this project was a way to contribute to the greater good. When he painted this work, Walker had just immigrated to the United States and this painting was one of his first jobs here. In Liberia, he also created art for the NGO Reading Liberia, which worked with Liberian writers and illustrators to create books. That work helped launch is career as an artist.
label: Description
content: .
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: Associated Place
content: China
setName: label: See more items in
content: Work and Industry: Philanthropy
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Craig Katz and Jan Schuetz-Mueller
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 2018.0267.01
label: accession number
content: 2018.0267
label: catalog number
content: 2018.0267.01
objectType: label: Object Name
content: painting
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: pencil; porous pen ink (overall material)
label: Physical Description
content: paper; watercolor paint (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 18 in x 24 in; 45.72 cm x 60.96 cm