Join Hilma’s Ghost for its second public program on Creating with a Shaman on Thursday, January 14 at 3:00pm EST, in collaboration with Carrie Secrist Gallery. The virtual event will include a brief lecture on contemporary art and shamanism by artists Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray, followed by a creative workshop led by Itzhak Beery, who will take participants on a shamanic journey.

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.

Itzhak Beery is an internationally recognized shamanic teacher, healer, speaker, community activist, artist, and author of three Amazon bestseller books. Itzhak apprenticed with Taita Don José Joaquin Pineda, a well-known fifth-generation Ecuadorian Quechua Yachak (shaman) from the village of Iluman, who initiated him into the 'Sacred 24 Yachaks Circle of Imbabura'. He was also initiated by Shoré, an Amazonian Kanamari Pajè (shaman) on the riverbanks of the Rio Negro. Itzhak studied and assisted for 12 years with Ipupiara Makunaiman (Dr. Bernardo Peixoto), a Brazilian Pajé from the Ure-eu-wau-wau tribe and his Peruvian curandera wife. Additionally, Itzhak studied with elders and shamans in North and South America, Greenland, Siberia, and Africa. Some of his contemporary teachers are Michael Harner, John Perkins, Hank Wesselman, Lewis Mehl-Madrona, and Tom Cowan. Itzhak's work has been featured in a variety of worldwide publications including the New York Times, radio, and television.

Shamanism is a sacred practice that uses altered states of consciousness to direct otherworldly spirits to the physical realm for the primary purpose of healing. In this 50 minute workshop, Beery will talk about his shamanic practice and lead participants into a journey in which they will connect with the inner landscape and the four elements. In this state, participants will be invited to use their preferred tools to create a drawing, a piece of music, to journal, or play with clay.

We encourage visual artists, musicians, poets and writers, and other creators to join us in the journey. Participants are requested to bring their preferred tools, be they art materials, a journal for writing, or anything else they can make or build with. Those who do not wish to create may simply light a candle and be still.

This workshop is for all levels.

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.