Around Town
Talking with Su Tamsett, Artist Whose ‘Disenfranchised: Hysterics of the 1940s’ Exhibition Is Showing Now at New Canaan Library
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The inspiration behind Su Tamsett’s powerful exhibition “Disenfranchised: Hysterics of the 1940s”—making its public debut now and through Dec. 14 in the H. Pelham Curtis Gallery at New Canaan Library—goes back to the native South Carolinian’s childhood observations on how others treated her beloved, late sister Sarah. A Ridgefield resident and longtime professional architect who took two bachelor’s degrees from the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, Tamsett during an interview with NewCanaanite.com (excerpts printed below) said that her gifted sister Sarah suffered from a specific type of disability that left the sibling unable to organize herself in space “and also in terms of time sequencing and any kind of paper work.”
Born of a toxemic pregnancy, Sarah’s condition went undiagnosed for many years, and Tamsett recalls seeing her sister misunderstood and largely marginalized for much of the sibling’s life. Some of that experience was recalled for Tamsett when, in the 1980s, she happened across a recently deceased relative’s medical notes, taken on two dozen women admitted to a highly regarded psychiatric hospital in the 1940s. Diagnosed as “hysterical” when that word, since abandoned as a medical term, held some real meaning for physicians, the women Tamsett read about would be relegated to institutions—and in many cases, to surgeries such as hysterectomies and certainly to what read today as barbaric, unfathomable treatment plans.