Erika Doss’s new book Spiritual Moderns retells the story of modern art with a more honest look at how religion shaped it.
Spiritualism
Spiritual Art Is Back, Again
Contemporary artists are looking to spiritual and divination systems to address today’s power structures.
Dead People Prefer Photography, Apparently
Shannon Taggart’s book SÈANCE pictures the supernatural occurrences in the lives of Spiritualists, seekers, mediums, and other occult practitioners.
Awakened by Matthew Thomas’s Spiritual Abstractions
By sharing his particular visual language, Thomas hopes to trigger our own connection to the divine.
Hilma af Klint Gets an Exquisite Seven-Volume Catalogue Raisonné
The latest volume of af Klint’s catalogue raisonné reveals the artist exploring the spiritual world with quasi-scientific deliberation.
Paulina Peavy, the Spiritualist Artist Who Channeled a UFO
Through her encounters with the spirit Lacamo, Peavy developed a cosmology based on 12,000-year cycles of evolution.
Turning to Art for Spiritual Sustenance
“A lot of people have been turning to art, needing space to process,” says the artist Edgar Fabián Frías, who, along with Hayley Barker, Julie Weitz, and Patrisse Cullors, has been discussing their art as spiritual practice.
A Photographer’s 16-Year Project to Capture the Contemporary Séance
Shannon Taggart started photographing the mediums of Lily Dale in 2001, and for 16 years after has documented the séances and practices of modern Spiritualism.
19th-Century Portraits of Historical Figures, Guided by Their Spirits
An American artist couple known as Wella P. and L. Pet Anderson made sketches of the dead that drew inspiration not from photographs or other visual records but from supposed communication with the departed themselves.