"Crip/Mad Archive Dances" by Petra Kuppers
EVENTS AT THE CENTER FOR MAD CULTURE
Our events celebrate the creativity, resilience, and history of mad identity. From exhibitions and performances to discussions and workshops, each gathering offers a space to challenge psychiatric oppression, reclaim mad narratives, and build community. Whether you come to witness, create, or connect, our events invite you to engage with madness as culture—alive, radical, and unapologetic.
Our workshops are done in partnership and with support from FRACTAL HOUSE: A Mad Clinic.
WORKSHOPS
Our workshops at the Center for Mad Culture offer hands-on spaces for creativity, learning, and connection through a mad lens. Whether exploring art, storytelling, history, or advocacy, each session invites participants to challenge dominant narratives, reclaim mad identity, and engage in collective meaning-making.
No expertise required—just a willingness to think, create, and imagine differently.
MAD POETS WRITING GROUP
Join us for a weekly writing circle honoring the poetry in and of us all. Facilitated by artist, poet, and peer mentor, Matt Bodett, founder of The Center for Mad Culture, this workshop series is part poetry class, part writing circle, and all mad focused. Co-facilitated by Lauren Hersch, therapist, poet, and founder of Fractal House: a mad clinic, this workshop series invites us to show up for the unfamiliar within and without as we honor, shape and voice what is divergent in us all.
There is an in-person workshop and an online version on different days.
IN-PERSON at Fractal House
2714 W Peterson Ave
Thursdays, June 4th to August 6th
6:00pm - 8:00pm
ONLINE
Saturdays May 9 to July 11
11:00am - 1:00pm (CST)
Hosted by The Cetner for Mad Culture
Online link will be provided to registrants
MAD PRINTS
This is a relief block printing workshop which will use historic images of fools as a basis for exploring image making and reexamining how we tell our stories.
This is a four week workshop which will run on Saturdays, June 6th to June 27th
Space is limited to 5 people, this is a first come first served workshop.
Mad Book Club
Our next year of Book Club is live and ready for you to read and engage with madness!
2026:
June 6th - The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
July 4th - The Man of Jasmine by Unica Zurn
August 1st - Selections from Storming Bedlam by Sasha Warren
September 5th - The poetry of Lal Ded
October 3rd - Selections from Committed by Susan Burch
November 7th - Selections from In the Realms of the Unreal by John G.H. Oaks
December 5th - Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society by Antonin Artaud
2027:
January 2nd - Clairvoyant Journals by Hannah Weiner
February 6th - Selections from Black Madness :: Mad Blackness by Theri Alyce Pickens
March 6th - Selections from the Stories of Leonora Carrington
April 3rd - Selections from Mad Pride by Ted Curtis, Robert Dellar, Esther Leslie, and Ben Watson
May 1st - [Abjections] by Evan Reynolds
Past readings have included:
4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane
Hamlet by Shakespeare
Storming Bedlam by Sasha Warren
The Great Easter by Jaque Besse
Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum by Antonia Hylton