Surveying the visual iconography of mental illness throughout the history of art often reveals a number of reoccurring and prevalent stereotypes, replete with stigma, shame, and misunderstanding. Looking to key examples from contemporary art, such as Anna Schuleit Haber’s installation Bloom (2003) and the Faces of Mental Health Recovery public art project (2014), shows that art has the power to reclaim traumatic and harmful pictorial narratives of mental illness, transforming past portrayals or sites of pain into powerful spaces of hope and belonging. Haber’s installation in a mental health hospital reclaimed this space through filling it with 28,000 potted plants and flowers, imbuing life and community through an evocative, living medium. Faces similarly relies on community, as it represents a partnership between patient and artist, collaborating together to create photographic portraits of mentally ill individuals at community mental health centers. These two examples provide a backdrop to explore contemporary art as a powerful medium that can transform the ways in which mental illness has been portrayed or represented visually, perhaps also playing a role in healing, understanding, and hope.

The Sandeen Lecture in the Humanities is named for Dr. Eric Sandeen, the founding director, and now director emeritus, of the Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research. The lecture is co-sponsored by the humanities research institute and the Wyoming Humanities Council.

The Sandeen Lecture takes place annually in December, on the Monday of finals week during the fall semester. Each year, the faculty fellows in the cohort of the institute's Humanities Research Group vote to decide which fellow will deliver the lecture, therefore to be chosen for it is a particular honor, showing the respect of one's peers and showcasing some of the best humanities research by UW faculty.