New Haven Independent

In an airy, sun-lit, renovated space where A.C. Gilbert or his industrial heirs used to manufacture parachutes during World War Two, at the corner of Peck and Blatchley in Erector Square, three New Haven organizations have come together to help people with serious mental illnesses make soft landings as they recover and rebuild their lives within the community.

The space feels like a small airplane hanger with an assortment of bright white Doric columns. It is ideal for sculpture, and the inaugural exhibition is comprised of works by well-established local sculptor Joseph Saccio, who’s represented by the Kehler-Liddel gallery in Westville.

At the opening reception Tuesday, more than 100 people enjoyed leaning on his trees made of austere cardboard rings, out of which nothing grows, but then are topped with puzzling tangle of new life on top. In other words, the art shown here lends itself to issues of recovery and rebirth.

That’s the point, according to Larry Davidson, the director of one of the Parachute Factory’s three founding organizations, Yale’s Program for Recovery and Community Health, or PRCH.

It does applied research and training in recovery from mental illness. Its innovation is its message to people with schizophrenia, serious depression, or other conditions formerly thought to sentence people to lives apart from society: Part of your recovery is to live in a community, be as independent as you can, get a job, have relationships. In short, not be walled off.

That’s where the arts come in. “One of our main interests in the arts,” he said, “is that the arts are a way of communicating things that can’t be communicated in other ways. Early in the history of psychiatry — with Freud, for example — the arts were far more appreciated, but for the last fifty years not so.”

So PRCH, along with the Community Services Network, a consortium of smaller organizations providing hands-on housing help, vocational training, and social rehabilitation to mainstream people into the community joined hands to give more access to art to their clients who are not normally going, to use Davidson’s words, to visit the Yale Center for British Art on their own.

So where did the art come from?

Enter the Arts Council of Greater New Haven and its program director Debbie Hess (pictured here with Davidson). She and the Arts Council have done shows in the past, such as Full Spectrum, on the creativity of artists with autism.

Add to that PRCH research scientists, such as Rebecca Miller (pictured at the top with Saccio) who just happen to be on Hess’s Arts Council advisory committee. Oh, and one more fortuitous factor: a sculptor who just happens to be a psychiatrist named Joe Saccio and who happens also to have had a longtime studio in Erector Square.

Throw in four years until the space was available (PRCH has had office space nearby, but nothing so soaring and good for the spirit - and Parachute Factory was born.

Saccio had an artist’s career — as a welder/sculptor — concomitant with the medical one. After his oldest child was killed in a 1979 car accident on Whitney Avenue, his work took the direction of a series of memorials. “That was the beginning of my interest in death and rebirth.”

But there’s also a lightness, a humor, and accessibility that is also almost playful (and encouraged by a repetition of forms) in the work. He encourages people to touch it. Chenice O’Neal, a Wilbur Cross High School junior, who works at CSN as an administrative assistant, is hugging “Once Upon a Tree I.” Saccio said that days before, during the installation, he saw Chenice standing in a kind of awe or amazement in front of the sculpture.

“I had seen pictures of sculpture,” she said, “but never the real thing that I could walk around and touch.”

Saccio described this moment as a kind of little epiphany, like a patient (not that Chenice is one) or a client in a moment of recovery, and growth, and opening up.

According to Hess, the idea is to intermingle the mental health audience with the art audience in rich new ways, which will include internships and trainings in the arts for people with mental illness, as well as making art accessible to them as gallery-goers and appreciators.

For Davidson and people at CSN, such as its senior program coordinator Kyle Pederson (pictured in front of Saccio’s “Rosary Penitential,” which struck four-year-old Margo Pederson as a big bejeweled porcupine), the exhibitions offer an artistic pretext to schedule programs and lectures around the art’s themes.

The next exhibition, for example, is called “Routes,” said Hess. “It’s a group show with, among others the artist Derek Leka, who’s been coloring the Parachute Factory’s pillars as part of his installation.” Another of the invited artists, added Hess does metaphorical maps, a third art based on neurological pathways.”

And what lectures do PRCH and CSN have in mind? They’re thinking of themes on routes to recovery and even transportation.

Spiritual or physical transportation? a reporter asked.

“One of the biggest difficulties for people with depression or schizophrenia is getting to and from appointments or work,” said Pedersen. “They don’t have cars, and so developing practical guides is immensely important. We do that here too.”

Joseph Saccio’s show is up through April 24, but the Parachute Factory is here to stay. Those interested in future programming or to make inquiries, email here.