September 25 – November 2, 2025
The Peale is proud to present Nellie Bly and the Lunatic’s Ball | A Girl Mad as Birds. This exhibition by artist Cheryl Parry explores the 19th-century belief that women were predisposed to madness, a notion that led to the misdiagnosis, institutionalization, and silencing of countless women. the installation brings together portraits, poetic objects, preserved bird skins, nests, and text to evoke the lives of women confined to asylums – sometimes for illnesses we would recognize today as minor, or even for behaviors as harmless as reading too much. The portraits are loosely based on photography by Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond, who in the 1850s used the new medium of photography to record female patients, convinced their features revealed signs of mental illness. While his theories were later discredited, his images remain as some of the only surviving visual traces of women erased from history.
The exhibition also looks to journalist Nellie Bly, who in 1887 courageously feigned insanity to gain entry into Blackwell’s Island Asylum in New York. Her exposé, Ten Days in a Madhouse, revealed the horrific mistreatment, starvation, and abuse faced by the patients, and brought public attention to the inhumanity of the asylum system. Within this context, The Lunatic’s Ball – a surreal, tragic tradition in which doctors, attendants, and patients all danced together for one night – becomes both an emblem of irony and a fragile glimpse of shared humanity.
Through the recurring metaphor of birds – caged, winged, longing for flight – Parry re-imagines the voices of women forced into silence. The title, drawn from Dylan Thomas’s poem Love in the Asylum, captures this yearning for freedom: “a girl mad as birds.” In conjuring these stories, Parry’s exhibition asks us to bear witness to forgotten lives and consider how art might awaken what history has left unsaid.
Featured Artists
Cheryl Parry is a visual artist whose work brings hidden histories and overlooked voices to light through painting, installation, and multimedia projects. Raised in Pennsylvania in a working-class Italian- and Irish-American family, Parry was captivated by images from an early age – first through storybook illustrations and religious art, and later through the transformative power of painting. This early fascination with pictures as carriers of meaning continues to inform her practice.
In Parry’s words, “the ability to transmute matter from the chemical substance of paint into illusions on canvas that bedazzle and convey meaning is magical. It has always been the way for me to bring back early experiences in childhood of a deep and visceral engagement with the world. It has also been a way for me as an adult to speak to what it is like in this time when the natural world is under serious threat…”.
Her recent projects include Nellie Bly & The Lunatic’s Ball, a series inspired by the trailblazing journalist who exposed abuses in women’s asylums, and A Girl Mad as Birds, which draws on poetry and surreal imagery to re-imagine the lives of women silenced by institutionalization. Both bodies of work reflect Parry’s ongoing exploration of art as a way to imagine what those rendered mute would say if they could.
Details
Date: September 25 – November 2, 2025
When: Open during regular Thursday – Sunday hours
Location: The Peale, 225 Holliday Street, Baltimore
Collaborators
Donations
Cost: Free | Donations Welcome
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