Hilma’s Ghost: Solstice Rituals

Tuesday, December 21, 2021
2PM CST / 3PM EST
Event Registration

Join Carrie Secrist Gallery and Hilma’s Ghost for its program on Solstice Rituals on Tuesday, December 21 at 2:00PM CST / 3:00PM EST. The virtual event will include a solstice ritual and participatory tarot reading workshop led by Sarah Potter, along with a discussion on the concept of darkness and its foundational relationship to the longest night of the year.

Founded by Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray, Hilma’s Ghost is a feminist artist collective that seeks to address existing art historical gaps in abstraction through sustained methods of praxis, research, and pedagogy. Hilma af Klint’s exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (October 12, 2018 – April 23, 2019) served as a reckoning for abstraction by women, trans, and non-binary peoples, whose narratives have been subsumed by dominant modes of western art history. Among other falsehoods, the art historical cannon created a faulty start for abstraction with Wassily Kandinsky’s 1910 manifesto Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Inspired by af Klint's resurgence, the collective’s purpose is to recover esoteric schools of thought that address abstraction through collaborative art making, rigorous study, innovative educational initiatives, and ritual practice.

Participants are requested to bring their own tarot deck. ABSTRACT FUTURES TAROT decks are available to order through the gallery here. Use code SOLSTICE for free shipping on orders through December 21, 2021 in the continental US.

Sarah Potter is a psychic medium and professional witch based in Manhattan. With over a decade of experience in the art world, Sarah has honed her skills building private and corporate collections infused with a conscious energy to transform spaces and enhance collectors' lives through the power of art. This includes the utilization of Color Magic, a means of using specific hues of the rainbow to conjure different energies and manifest personal transformation. Working with both private and corporate clients, Sarah has shared the magic of color and Tarot with thousands over the years to promote self-empowerment, problem solving, and amplified intuitive skills through lectures, workshops, retreats, and one on one services. Sarah and her various endeavors have been featured in such places as Architectural Digest, Artnet, Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan, and beyond

Dannielle Tegeder is an artist and professor at The City University of New York at Lehman College. For the past fifteen years, her work has explored abstraction through the lens of systems, architecture, utopianism, and the function of modernism. While the core of her practice is paintings and drawings, she also works in large-scale installation, mobiles, video, sound, and animation and has done a number of collaborations with composers, dancers, and writers. In March 2020 Tegeder founded The Pandemic Salon, a community-centric project intended to dismantle the hierarchical structures of institutional discussion, which showcases topics related to the pandemic by bringing together creative minds in an informal, online environment that has connected over 600 participants from 40 countries.

Sharmistha Ray is an artist, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. Through the subjective lens of queerness, language, memory, spiritual faith, and personal evidence, their work emerges out of the experiences of war, (im)migration, alienation, and familial and romantic separation to engage themes of intimacy, (be)longing, displacement, and survival. Ray's practice, which consists of paintings, drawings, printmaking, sculptures, installations, photographs, cultural programming, and hybrid texts, is experiential, research and project-based, theoretical, and interdisciplinary.