Mad Tea

We sit down with Colombian artist Polvo Eres, whose exhibition Our Existence is Protest is currently on view at the Center for Mad Culture. Born out of fear of government crackdowns on mad, disabled, houseless, and immigrant communities, the project transformed the Center into a space of resistance where community members could gather, set type, and print their own posters of protest.

In this conversation, we talk about political violence, the weaponization of psychiatric language, and the power of creating together when traditional protest spaces are inaccessible. As part of the show, visitors also left their own messages of protest, two of which are shared at the end of the episode.

Instagram: @polvo.eres

website: polvoeres.co

In this episode of Mad Tea, we dive into the extraordinary hidden world of Henry Joseph Darger Jr. (1892–1973). A reclusive hospital custodian in Chicago, Darger spent decades creating a 15,000-page epic and hundreds of massive watercolors that no one saw until after his death.

We trace his childhood losses and institutionalization, his solitary adult life, and the vast universe of the Vivian Girls, their endless rebellions, and the dreamlike collages drawn from mass culture. We also look at the debates around his reception: outsider art, madness, violence, and Queer readings that complicate how we understand his life.

Darger’s story asks us to think about who gets remembered, who is erased, and how madness can be a site of creativity as well as struggle.

In this episode of Mad Tea, we explore how 19th- and early 20th-century psychiatry turned the poetry of the mad into medical evidence. From Dr. G. Mackenzie Bacon’s Writing of the Insane to Ales Hrdlička’s Art and Literature in the Mentally Abnormal, we look at how doctors treated poems and letters as “symptoms” instead of works of art.

We contrast that history with a mad-centered reading—seeing repetition, metaphor, and fragmentation not as disorder but as strategies of expression and survival. Along the way we discuss surrealism, Antonin Artaud, and Hannah Weiner’s clairvoyant journals, highlighting how psychiatry’s categories like “logorrhea” and “graphomania” have been reimagined by poets and activists as creative methods.

We also ask: What happens when madness is read as method instead of failure? What shifts when we reclaim mad poetics as part of literary and cultural history?

This episode explores mad liberation as both personal truth and collective resistance. We revisit themes from earlier conversations, not out of redundancy, but as an act of solidarity in the face of ongoing political hostility toward mad lives. Through reflection, metaphor, and lived experience, we examine how societal roles are imposed, how resistance becomes community building, and why affirming our presence is essential during times of national crisis.

In this episode, recorded live at Access Living on August 7th, 2025, Matt Bodett explores the relationship between madness and culture, examining how it has shaped our histories and creative expressions, and how it has been systematically erased from them. Part of Cripping the Galleries, a collaboration with Bodies of Work, Access Living, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Art Institute of Chicago, the talk invites us to reconsider what is lost when mad culture is silenced and what can emerge when it is recognized. This is also our first episode with an accompanying video, offering a visual supplement to the conversation.

🚨 In this episode of Mad Tea, we break down Trump’s new Executive Order on homelessness and mental health line by line. What looks like care is actually surveillance, coercion, and criminalization. We name the harm, expose the language, and offer solidarity.

Housing is a right. Madness is not a crime.

Listen now.

Here is a link to the executive order on the government's website:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/ending-crime-and-disorder-on-americas-streets/

In this episode of Mad Tea, Matt and Megan explore the idea of ghosts—not the spectral kind, but those that haunt our memories, bodies, and inner landscapes. Through the stories of Milarepa, the Tibetan “mad yogi,” and Vincent van Gogh, they reflect on how madness can be met not with fear or suppression, but with compassion, invitation, and integration. These figures did not escape their suffering but transformed their relationship to it, offering a powerful model for how we might sit with our own madness.

What does it mean to be responsible as a mad person in a world that refuses to recognize your reality? In this episode, Matt Bodett and Megan Sterling explore the difficult, necessary, and expansive terrain of mad responsibility. Drawing from the myth of Herakles and his labors, we ask: What happens when madness causes harm? What is penance without punishment? And how do we create communities that hold accountability without exile?

Through conversation, reflection, and critique, we look at what it means to lead from within madness, to translate mad experience without betrayal, and to honor the silences that cannot be filled. We invite you to consider what kind of spaces, relationships, and futures we might build when we refuse the scripts of guilt and begin to write our own terms of care.

In this special reflection episode, we step away from biographies and histories to explore madness itself—not as a diagnosis, but as a philosophy. What happens when madness is seen not as error, but as insight? Not as disorder, but as sacred rupture?

Drawing on lived experience, poetic language, and philosophical frameworks, this episode invites listeners into a deeper meditation on perception, beauty, coherence, and the illusions we call normalcy. Along the way, we consider the limits of reason, the violence of performance, the possibilities of peer care, and why madness might be closer to the truth than we’re often allowed to believe.

This episode is slower, more spacious. This episode is an offering for those who have stood at the edge and wondered what it means to keep going.

In this episode, we trace the haunting life and visionary work of Unica Zürn. She was a German/French surrealist, poet, and artist. Through drawings, anagram poetry, and hallucinatory writing, Zürn reimagined madness not as pathology, but as a form of expression. We explore her relationships, institutionalization, and artistic resistance, asking what it means to write from a dangerous place.