Winter Series: Exploring Spirituality

Meeting online! | Link to Register: https://www.artencounter.org/winter-series

Join us for our Winter Series this January and February! During the coldest time of year, stay warm in the comfort of your own home and meet us on Zoom to investigate work by recently recognized female artists from the twentieth century. Then, in February, join us in person to explore two exhibits featuring artists from different regions in the Americas, focusing first on women artists from South America and the Caribbean at the DePaul Museum and then on artists from the Caribbean diaspora at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.  

Our first session will focus on three recently recognized female artists exploring ideas of spirituality. After years of neglect, Hilma af Klint’s groundbreaking work was featured in a major exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2017. Although abstract, her work was inspired by her devotion to spiritualism of the late 19th and early 20th century. The artist, one of the first to create abstract work, made some effort to display her work before requesting that her paintings remain hidden until two decades after her death, when she believed the public might be ready for them. Belkis Ayón was a Cuban artist who used inventive techniques to create large-scale prints. Her work concentrated on Abukua, a secret male association, originating in Nigeria and brought to Haiti and then Cuba during the slave trade. We will talk about the complex mythologies the artist researched and expressed in her mysterious work. We will conclude with Agnes Lawrence Pelton, known as “The Desert Transcendentalist” for her mystical and poetic paintings. Although exhibited early on and respected by modernist artists, her work was rarely shown, perhaps because she lived off the beaten path of the cultural centers of her day. 

Image Credit: Altarpieces, Group X, No.1 by Hilma af Klint