Join Hilma’s Ghost for its fourth public program on Grieving Through Creative Strengths with (Soma)tic Rituals on Thursday, May 20 at 4:00pm EST, in collaboration with Carrie Secrist Gallery. The virtual event will include a brief lecture on the therapeutic capabilities of art by artists Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray, followed by a creative workshop led by CAConrad, including teachings on how to create rituals for grieving.

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.

CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of Amanda Paradise (Wave Books, 2021). Other titles include The Book of Frank, While Standing in Line for Death, and Ecodeviance. They received a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Magazine Book Award. They teach at Columbia University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam.

Following a year of isolation, distance, and widespread loss, burnout and grief pervade our day to day lives. This session with CA Conrad focuses on somatic rituals to connect deeply with our bodies and find presence of mind. The workshop will address death and how to make sense of loss. We will learn how to create our own rituals as a means of grieving.

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.