Draft:Issa Ibrahim

• Comment: Doesn't meet WP:NARTIST. Safari Scribe^{Edits! Talk!} 05:48, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

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Ibrahim painting in his studio in Queens in 2022

Issa Ibrahim (June 19, 1965) is an American author and outsider artist from Jamaica, Queens, most known for being the subject of Jessica Yu's documentary The Living Museum, nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival.

Biography

Ibrahim was born to an artist mother and musician father in Queens, New York in 1965. He attended Manhattan’s High School of Art and Design and later studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Accidental Killing

In February 1990, at the age of 24, Ibrahim accidentally killed his mother while experiencing a psychotic break after smoking marijuana. He accepted an insanity plea and was committed to Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, the largest state psychiatric institution in New York.

Creedmoor Mental Hospital

At Creedmoor Ibrahim joined The Living Museum, an art program created in an abandoned building on the grounds of the hospital, and the backdrop for Yu's documentary. Self-taught, he began painting as a way to cope, and over the years cultivated it into a marketable talent. While participating in the program he met his wife Susan, also an artist. Ibrahim was released from the hospital in 2009, nearly twenty years after he was committed. In an audio interview with NPR in 2013, he cited his desire to expose the realities of what he called "a broken mental health system," which he would later expand in his book The Hospital Always Wins.

The Hospital Always Wins

Ibrahim released the memoir The Hospital Always Wins In 2016 under Chicago Review Press, recounting his early development of mental illness, his 20-year stint at Creedmoor, and his long road to rehabilitation.

The Library Journal called it "Insightful, troubling, touching and poetic," and Kirkus Reviews said "It reveals both an irrepressible individual with a talent for survival and a mental health system in dire need of repair."

News Documentaries

Ibrahim appeared on the German public television program Selbstbestimmt (Self-determined) in 1997, his first televised interview following his mother's accidental death, speaking about the impact of The Living Museum on his recovery.

Radio producer Laura Starecheski told Ibrahim's story on NPR's State of the Re:Union in 2014, a compilation of over ten years of recordings of Ibrahim at the hospital. She won the Edward R. Murrow Award and Third Coast Director's Choice Award for Best News Documentary. The segment was also listed by Harvard University’s Nieman’s Storyboard as one of the best audio narratives of 2014 in the United States, and Sharon Davis of Radio Doc Review called the documentary "a graphic insight into the thinking of a schizophrenic mind."

In 2016 Ibrahim appeared on the New York Public Radio talk show The Leonard Lopate Show.

Painting and Music

Ibrahim's paintings have appeared in numerous galleries and non-profit spaces since 2009, including regular showings at The Fountain House Gallery in Hell's Kitchen. In 2016 Ibrahim released Patient's Rites, an autobiographical musical documentary about lessons learned at Creedmoor.