Conduits of the unseen: women artists imagine other worlds

Conduits of the unseen: women artists imagine other worlds brings together 17 artists from the early 20th century onward who gave visual form to alternate realities, spirits, cosmic forces, and other planes of consciousness. The exhibition is anchored by the work of Paulina Peavy, a pioneering visionary artist known for channeling her paintings, drawings, and ornamented masks through a spirit guide, alongside acclaimed Surrealists Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini, seminal painters such as Agnes Pelton, and mediums like Madge Gill and Emma Kunz. Spanning time periods, nations, socioeconomic backgrounds, and spiritual belief systems, the artists on view are united by a shared desire to give form to their inner visions, expressed across landscapes, portraits, narratives, and pure abstraction. Curated by Susan L. Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor in the Art History and Visual Culture Program at Bard College, the exhibition is on view through October 31, 2026. At the center of the exhibition is American artist and medium Paulina Peavy (1901– 1999), whose work mapped her understanding of the world and a cosmic philosophy imparted to her by a spirit called Lacamo. Working through an iterative process over many decades, Peavy hoped her creations would expand individual and collective capacity for psychic phenomena. Conduits of the unseen is grounded in Peavy’s multifaceted body of work, including writings on esoteric metaphysics, drawings and other works on paper, masks she made to facilitate communication with Lacamo, and paintings depicting biomorphic forms and energy beams. The exhibition follows the 2023 release of the first monograph dedicated to the artist, Paulina Peavy: etherian channeler by Laura Whitcomb, published by Andrew Edlin Gallery. Conduits of the unseen features works by other important mediumistic artists, including German-born Agatha Wojciechowsky (1896-1986), who conducted séances in New York and practiced psychic readings and spiritual healing. Wojciechowsky’s black-and-white ink drawings and notebooks record a language she said came to her through spiritual contact, which will be on view alongside brightly colored watercolors of sitters’ hands that revealed faces her clients recognized. Other artists in the exhibition, such as Adele Watson (1873-1947), arrived at similar visionary terrain not through active channeling but through studying the spiritual dimension of nature and esoteric movements. Two of Watson’s symbolist paintings will be on view, depicting ghostly female nudes floating above idyllic landscapes. Agnes Pelton (1881-1961), a Theosophist and practitioner of Agni Yoga whose semi-abstract paintings were made from images she obtained while meditating, became a great influence on the Transcendentalist Group in Santa Fe, New Mexico. One of her key works from this time, The being: a transcendental vision, is included in Conduits of the unseen, along with an abstract watercolor by Hilla Rebay (1890-1967), co-founder of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and a watercolor study of floating geometric shapes through an ambiguous space by Helen Kendall (1892-1970), who, like Pelton, drew on the spiritual frameworks of Theosophy and Anthroposophy. Additional highlights include works from Surrealists, including Leonora Carrington’s unproduced 1970 play Opus siniestrus, which follows an old woman battling patriarchy and centers on the last surviving human egg, shown alongside a selection of paintings by Carrington’s friend and fellow Surrealist Leonor Fini; Juanita Guccione’s paintings of amazonian women as well as her abstract, New Age-inflected landscapes; and two of Sylvia Fein’s dreamlike, surrealist landscapes.