On the walls of “Supernatural America,” one can see artworks credited to “Frances Haines McVey and William Blake (Spirit)” and “Agatha Wojciechowsky and Spirits.” Here we are dealing with artists who believed themselves to be in actual contact with the other world and brought back what they believed to be testimony of such encounters. They are based on the artists’ personal relationship to Spiritualism, haunting, visitation, clairvoyance, trance states, and magic.” Visitors to the Speed, or to Mia later on, should, therefore, be aware that this is no ordinary museum show. Ghosts, interplanetary visitors, and interdimensional worlds are rarely metaphors in this work-although they can be both real and representative of larger ideas. Historical archives and interviews confirmed their relationship to this material living artists discussed it with me. As he puts it in an essay in the exhibition catalogue, “Nearly all the objects selected for ‘Supernatural America’ are either by artists who described their supernatural encounters, were mediums and practitioners, or made images based on the anomalous experiences of intimates. In “Supernatural America,” Cozzolino makes no distinction between outsider and insider art what concerns him is the artist’s sensitivity to spiritual influences. In 2014, he organized a major exhibition dedicated to the visual art of David Lynch-himself a connoisseur, if ever there was, of the weird traces beneath the surfaces of American life. Finally, it will be on view at Mia from February 19 through May 15, 2022.Ĭozzolino has been dubbed “the curator of the dispossessed” because of his championing of artists from outside the mainstream, and his interests have led him far afield from the usual museum fare. (through January 2, 2022), after a run at the Toledo Museum of Art in the summer. “Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art” is touring the country and opens October 7-right in time for Halloween-at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky. It is the ambition of Robert Cozzolino, curator of paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), to make sure that they are overlooked no longer, and to that end he has organized a large-scale exhibition that pulls the black velvet curtain aside to reveal the tendrils of ectoplasm that drift through our art history.
That all these phenomena are present in American art should come as no surprise, even if their presence remains-perhaps appropriately-somewhat subliminal and often overlooked. The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles CA, F-Ours-1S06.05 Photo: Courtesy Tony Oursler, © Tony Oursler Tony Oursler, Dust, from Thought Forms, 2006, fiberglass sculpture, Haron Kardon HS100 5.1 sound system, Sony XGA VPL-PX41 projector, 2 Sanyo PLC-XU48 projectors, 3 DVD players, 6 DVDs, and 3 master tapes, 72 × 72 × 72 in. In the 20th century, interest in Spiritualism persisted, bolstered by the tremendous grief of the world wars, joined by new otherworldly pursuits such as ESP research, astrology, the occult, and the New Age. In the middle of the 19th century, America gave the world Spiritualism, a mass movement dedicated to making contact with the souls of the dead. In later times, the supernatural stream was more likely to run underground, but it was always there, bubbling beneath the surface.
The Puritan religion, with its emphasis on sin and punishment, brought the other world shudderingly close to its adherents. The harsh conditions faced by the early settlers, the frequent violence of their lives, and the rugged landscapes that surrounded them combined to create of sense of being haunted. The United States has the reputation of being a hard-headedly rationalistic, materialistic nation, but in fact, Americans have been ghost-obsessed from colonial days down to the present time. The impact of ghosts and the spirit world on American art is explored in depth in a highly unusual museum exhibition
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