Artist Christopher Payne’s new exhibition of photographs of abandoned mental institutions, entitled Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospital, will be on display at Drexel University’s Leonard Pearlstein Gallery (Nesbitt Hall, 3215 Market St) through October 29^th.

Thephotographs document what were once monuments of civic pride, built with noble intentions by leading architects and physicians, who envisioned asylums as a places of refuge, therapy and healing, but are now institutions that have been abandoned.