When we say an artist, musician, or high-caliber entertainer “works their magic,” we’re acknowledging there’s something extra-ordinary about the creation and experience of art. We go to art because there is something immaterial there; that is, there’s something in a painting beyond the material qualities of cotton cloth and pigments made of chemically colored mineral salts suspended in oil from crushed seeds.
In its most idealized forms, this special quality in art, from the earliest cave paintings to the canvases of Raphael, Turner, and the Hudson River School, lifts us momentarily out of the everyday and can even point toward a realm not wholly unlike the spiritual. It’s why historically art and religion have had a special relationship.
Lest we forget though, art has had a long and colorful relationship with marketing, promotion, and salesmanship too, of course. Just sometimes the material and the immaterial in art intertwine in very interesting and entertaining ways.
”An Evening in Spirit Land with Hermann the Great”
Beginning in the mid-1800s, self-proclaimed “Spiritualists” and magical entertainers enthralled American and European audiences with performances and “demonstrations” of how the living might communicate with the dead. Mediums and magicians attracted multitudes of willing believers, hard skeptics, and those in between to elaborate stage shows and parlor séances. They even fostered critique and competition among themselves and their followers by asking, what makes for evidence that ghostly entities exist?
An exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. Parts the curtain on this turn-of-the-twentieth century phenom for a peek behind the veil. Conjuring the Spirit World explores the carefully designed art and objects of these entertainers.
The exhibition includes various uses of visual art as well as specially constructed objects some of these “conjurors” activated when supposedly drawing forth the departed. Marketing posters proclaim, with vivid color and imagery, breathtaking “demonstrations” of otherworldly phenomena.
Audiences of the time ranged from the bemused and the curious to the 100% serious and scientific. They wondered whether spirits and their apparent materializations were indeed fact or far-flung fiction – whether these conjurors and mediums could really prove that the supernatural exists invisibly, side by side with the natural world.
William Sidney Mount, “Saul and the Witch of Endor,” 1828. Oil on canvas. Smithsonian American Art, Museum, Washington, DC,
On view at PEM from September 14, 2024 through February 2, 2025 Conjuring the Spirit World really aims to examine the ongoing human impulse and desire to connect with the departed, as well as our enduring fascination with the supernatural and the otherworldly. Paintings, posters, photographs, stage apparatuses, films, publications and other objects transport visitors to the age of Harry Houdini, Margery the Medium, Howard Thurston and the Fox Sisters. “Whether you’re a believer, a skeptic or somewhere in between, visitors will gain a new perspective on the timeless draw of mediums and magicians, séances, and magic shows,” they say.
“The subject matter, artworks and interactive and performance features of Conjuring the Spirit World reanimate an era that was marked by a curiosity around mortality, an embrace of the mysterious and, fundamentally, a deep yearning for connection,” said Curator-at-Large George Schwartz. “This exhibition is among the first to look at mediums and stage magicians in relation to the Spiritualist movement, a movement which had deep roots here in Salem, Massachusetts.”
That “deep yearning for connection” both to the earth, the divine, and to each other is precisely, I would argue, at the common heart of art, magic, and science.
Objects from PEM’s collection, several of which have never been exhibited, offer a glimpse into how visual and material culture influenced the perception of Spiritualism at the time and how the legacy of the movement and its concepts surrounding death and the afterlife persist today. PEM works include advertising posters, mourning jewelry and a rapping hand used to conjure spirits. These works are presented alongside key loans from collectors across the country.
On select Saturdays from September 21 through February 2 between noon–3 pm, a theater within the exhibition gallery is showcasing magic performances by two Salem magicians: Anton James Andresen (the Official Magician of Salem) and Evan Northrup (also a Boston-area theater artist and previous PEM collaborator). Visitors can expect storytelling and sleight of hand that illuminate the real stage performers and illusions featured in the exhibition. Videos, silent films and interactive experiences are installed throughout the exhibition to heighten the experience.
Thayer Magic Manufacturing Company, Los Angeles, “Dr. Q spirit hand,” about 1930. Wood, paint, lace and felt. Museum purchase, by exchange. 2022.29.2. Peabody
Essex Museum. Photo by Kathy Tarantola/PEM.
Conjuring the Spirit World also offers new perspectives on lesser-known aspects and considerations of the era, including how mediumship and magic served as a source of agency and reinvention for women and other marginalized communities; the relationship between science and Spiritualism; and a neuroscientific understanding of belief.
There’s a reason the word “magic” often enters the creative art vocabulary – we love to be amazed at what people can do, and even at what WE can do. Learn for yourself some of the “magic” behind COLOR, COMPOSITION, and CRAFT in these videos right here.
