Spirits Against the Patriarchy: Occult Art's Feminist Revolt in Tribeca

Seventeen women artists occupy Andrew Edlin Gallery in Tribeca, and every one of them claims a spirit as collaborator. The exhibition, Conduits of the Unseen: Women Artists Imagine Other Worlds, gathers work made through spirit communication — a practice the art historical canon mostly filed under "eccentric" and forgot.

The show arrives amid a wave of occult-themed exhibitions. This one differs by asking what esoteric art can actually do: foregrounding its power to challenge entrenched social hierarchies rather than treating it as a curiosity.

Who was Paulina Peavy's spirit collaborator?

Enter the gallery and Paulina Peavey's jewel-like visions command attention. They gleam against cobalt-blue walls. Vivid, almost embryonic folds hold droplets, petals, and eyes. Reds, blues, and yellows overlap like stained glass — one concrete comparison, and it earns its place.

Peavey attributed her work to Lacamo, a nonbinary spirit who began communicating with her in the 1930s. Lacamo, as Peavey told it, envisioned humanity evolving toward "one-gender perfection."

That was decades before mainstream art institutions showed interest in gender as anything other than a fixed category. The spirits, it turns out, got there first.

What do the spirits actually say?

Curator Susan Aberth sees a pattern across all 17 artists. In a lecture on the exhibition, she connected Peavey's work to the show's broader argument: "Their messages are specifically meant to better the world. And how do you better the world? All of the spirits say, 'Get rid of patriarchy.'"

The line lands hard. It reframes spiritualist art not as escapism but as critique — messages from elsewhere that consistently targeted the same earthly power structure.

Did the Surrealists steal the technique?

André Breton built Surrealism on "psychic automatism" — an art practice wherein the artist suppresses conscious control to allow unconscious thoughts to run free. The concept, Aberth notes, had a prior home.

"He took it directly from spiritualist women, but he purged the metaphysical content completely from it," Aberth said. The move recast the mediums' practices as expressions of the individual psyche, stripping the spirits from work that was, in fact, all about them.

The appropriation reads like a textbook case of the tradition being absorbed while its authors were dismissed. Men got the movement; women got the footnote.

Why does this exhibition matter now?

Conduits of the Unseen reassembles the pieces Breton separated. It puts the metaphysics back into automatism and the politics back into the metaphysics. If every spirit in the room demanded the end of patriarchy, the exhibition suggests the beyond was never as otherworldly as it looked — and the gallery walls in Tribeca now carry the message the canon edited out.