In Gaithersburg, Maryland, art curator Sandra Davis set 14 chairs on display in the Arts Barn’s professional art gallery in 2024. Each chair, handmade by a different artist, evoked a mental health issue that the artist had grappled with.
Courtney Mohring’s chair, “Buttoned Up,” was a black, high-backed chair coated in buttons and bunched fabric that communicated discomfort. Molly McCracken’s bright, tentacled “Panic” chair looked akin to the character “Anxiety” in Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” — an uncanny coincidence, given that the piece was designed prior to the film’s release.
And Davis herself had a piece in the exhibit — a plush, rainbow concoction titled “Color Me Manic.”
“My spouse has dealt with some mental health issues throughout the 42 years we’ve been married,” Davis told WTOP News. “And I can remember episodes when he would go through a manic state — that particular chair is a description of that sort of garish, loud, extreme feeling that a person may go through.”
For many of the artists, it was an opportunity to try a medium that they had never attempted before.
“It was nice to have something to ground myself to, and it was a near and dear to me topic, exploring mental health,” Mohring said in a video for the gallery. “And then also just the chair — it was kind of a way to get off of a canvas and onto something different.”
The exhibit — titled “Pull Up a Chair 2.0” — was a kind of “sequel” installment to a similar showcase that Davis curated in 2022, which also featured handmade chairs.
At the gallery, the artists came in to talk about their art, but the night soon transformed into a deeper conversation about the feelings of anxiety, loss, and isolation that Davis and her fellow artists had experienced at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We had what we call an ‘artist roundtable,’ where each of the artists came to talk about what their inspiration was, what they were feeling when they were creating the chair, and it ended up feeling very much like a group therapy session,” Davis said.
This time, Davis wanted to replicate that experience on a grander scale, by opening it up to the public and inviting guests to pull up a chair and talk about the art — and how it relates to their own mental health journeys.
“We know the mental health conversation is top of mind,” Davis said. “We hear it in the news, we’re reading about it. They’re talking about it at school. But we haven’t really necessarily [felt] like it’s still a welcoming conversation.”
But Davis believes we can slowly change those conversations for the better — and it starts with making space for them.
See the artists and their work below:
A version of this article originally appeared in the 2025 Mental Health Edition of the Goodnewspaper
Header images via Aaron Davis
