Hilma’s Ghost

Automatic Theorem Paintings, 2022

In RADICAL SPIRITS: Tarot, Automatism, and Feminist Histories, Tegeder and Ray will explore the creative, spiritual, and narrative potential of tarot, mediumship, and automatism in art-making. In this, they tap into the long-established but overlooked history of these practices at Hill-Stead. The museum’s founder and architect, Theodate Pope Riddle, was a contemporary of af Klint. She passionately supported exploration of the spirit world, participating in séances with notable mediums and funding psychical research. Automatic writing from those séances (and now housed in Hill-Stead’s library), is a core element of the exhibition, which entwines the history of Spiritualism in the Americas and Europe with automatic processes in art. As part of their research, Tegeder and Ray participated in channeling and drawing sessions at the historic house, facilitated by Sarah Potter, a professional witch, and engaged in other ritual and divinatory practices to create five new paintings for the show. These new works recover the lost art of theorem painting, a popular stenciling technique that was taught in girls’ academies throughout New England in the nineteenth century.

RADICAL SPIRITS takes its title from a foundational 1989 book by Ann Braude that considers the importance of Spiritualism to the political liberation of American women in the nineteenth century. Hilma’s Ghost, initiated at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, reimagines the relationship between the spiritual and the political for a new era of liberation for women, nonbinary, and trans artists. In this way, the collective builds on the ancestral legacies of the powerful women artists who bravely drew on the occult in their work, including af Klint, Smith, Emma Kunz, and Leonora Carrington, but also those, like Ana Mendieta and Lygia Clark, who channeled the shamanic healing power of art for themselves.