Join Hilma’s Ghost for its third public program on Sigils and Spellcasting on Thursday, April 1 at 3:00pm EST, in collaboration with Carrie Secrist Gallery. The virtual event will include a brief lecture on contemporary art and witchcraft by artists Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray, followed by a creative workshop led by Sarah Cooper, including teachings on occult history and the lexicon of sigils.

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.

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.

A symbolic language is a potent part of various magical practices throughout the world. Sigils, magical symbols created to enhance our intentions, are a widely used foundation for spellcasting. In this workshop, we will explore various sigils and their occult history. In the interactive portion, we will learn how to intuitively create our own unique sigils and give it meaning to enhance our manifestation, meditation, or art creation practice.

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.