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" Name: Anna SchuleitAge:  32Job:  Painter and installation artistLocation:  Brooklyn, New YorkFamous words: &amp;quot;The last thing I want to do is make mental patients feel violated for having suffered from an uncontrollable illness.&amp;quot;  German-born artist Anna Schuleit went from anonymous to Einstein virtually overnight, thanks to a call from the MacArthur Foundation announcing that she&amp;#039;d won a 2006 &amp;quot;Genius&amp;quot; grant for $500,000. Schuleit, one of the youngest recipients of the prize, focuses on turning unexpected places-from hospitals to small islands-into oversize &amp;quot;canvases&amp;quot; for her work. While constructing Habeas Corpus, she wired an abandoned mental hospital to play the music of Bach and asked former patients to tell their stories; for Bloom, she carpeted the Massachusetts Mental Health Center with an arrangement of 28,000 flowers. Currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, Schuleit uses her art to celebrate those who are often overlooked.  Q: Your artistic style is pretty unique- what do you call it? A: There&amp;#039;s a field called oral history, where people tell the stories of their lives in their own words. What I&amp;#039;d like to be is a collector of visual history, where people draw what they remember of their life experiences.  Q: Habeas Corpus was a 28-minute musical installation at a former mental hospital. How did it work? A: The idea was to make the building &amp;quot;sing,&amp;quot; to turn an abandoned structure into an instrument by filling the hollows and voids inside the building with voices, as you would use the hollows inside a guitar or violin. I chose a recording of Bach&amp;#039;s Magnificat, played through strategically located speakers, making it seem as though the music poured through windows and doors.  Q: Why the interest in mental illness? A: There&amp;#039;s this quote, &amp;quot;The degree of civilization of a nation can be measured by the way it treats its weakest citizens.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;ve always been drawn to telling the stories of those citizens.  Q: $500,000 is a lot of cash! Has it changed your approach as an artist? A: As a visual artist, there are many ways to stay afloat. You can take another job, which I have a million times, or you can try to make your work the money-earning source. If I&amp;#039;d signed on with a gallery, it would have been easier, but I also would never have been able to go &amp;quot;underwater&amp;quot; for long stretches of time, when I needed to work without any outside input. I was more or less penniless-making $10,000 or $11,000 a year, which is about poverty level in New York state.  Q: Tell us about your next project, in Boston Harbor. A: It takes place on an island that&amp;#039;s uninhabited, but like an old piece of leather, it&amp;#039;s marked by layers of previous human use. The installation uses glass and reflective surfaces to tell the story of the island&amp;#039;s former residents- about the absence of these people and what marks they made on the land that are still visible today.  To learn more about Schuleit&amp;#039;s work, log on to anna-schuleit.com. For information on how to apply for a grant through the MacArthur Foundation, log on to www.macfound.org. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.marieclaire.com/culture/news/a358/pretty-face-schuleit/>