Jodie Mim Goodnough creates wall-hung, tufted wool pieces using contemporary rug-making techniques. Her work recontextualizes and manipulates historical imagery “in order to address issues such as medical patriarchy, physical isolation and bodily anxiety.” For the work in “Old Wives’ Tales”, she borrows and expands on illustrations from “Ten Days in a Madhouse”- an 1887 investigative journalism piece by Nellie Bly, for which the author went undercover as a patient in order to expose the deplorable conditions and abuse of patients inside Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island.

Goodnough offers new narrative possibilities for the patients of the now-closed institution by reworking and expanding on existing illustrations from the original story. Intermixed with these scenes in the gallery are depictions of various archaic apparatuses and remedies that have historically been used to treat women’s maladies. Through this work, Goodnough asks the viewer to “reflect on how much progress has truly been made” in the medical treatment of women since such a time.