Conjuring the spirit world art magic and mediums

By Debra Cash



This simultaneously entertaining and provocative show contests the premise that people today are invariably more sophisticated than those who lived in spiritualism’s heyday.


Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem MA, through February 2, 2025. Exhibition travels to The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art | March 15–July 13, 202


The Otis Lithograph Company, Cleveland, Thurston The Great Magician — The Wonder Show of the Earth — Do the Spirits Come Back?, (detail) 1929. Photo: Kathy Tarantola/PEM.


Mortality is unfathomable.

Matthew Brady’s photographs showing Civil War soldiers lying like so much spent materiel in a denuded
Antietam
encampment exposed the reality of dead men who would never find a resting place near their loved ones, north or south. Just brief decades earlier, photography had come onto the scene, in Susan Sontag’s phrase, as a nascent “technology of persistence.” Along with the telegraph – and who could have imagined nearly instantaneous communication across both time and space? –people were beginning to come to terms with the idea that limits could be breached, and maybe, just maybe, the

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Explore the essential role art and objects played for mediums and magicians “communicating” with the dead during the 19th- and 20th-century Spiritualism movement in the U.S. and Europe — a time when people actively debated and wondered, "can spirits return?" See paintings, posters, photographs, stage apparatuses, costumes, film, publications and other objects that will transport visitors to the age of Harry Houdini, Margery the Medium, Howard Thurston, and the Fox Sisters, among others. Whether you’re a believer, skeptic or somewhere in between, gain a new perspective on the timeless draw of mediums and magicians, séances and magic shows.

Follow along on social media using #ConjuringatPEM


Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums
is organized by the Peabody Essex Museum. This exhibition is made possible by Carolyn and Peter S. Lynch and The Lynch Foundation and Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund. We thank Jennifer and Andrew Borggaard, James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes, Chip and Susan Robie, and Timothy T. Hilton as supporters of the Exhibition Innovation Fund. We also recognize the generosity of the East India Marine Associates of the Peabody Essex


Conjuring the Spirit World



Peabody Essex Museum
September 14, 2024–February 2, 2025
by Angelina Diamante




A sincere recognition of the ephemera spanning nearly a century that defines
Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums
—a five-month-long survey of Spiritualism at the Peabody Essex Museum of Salem, Massachusetts—requires a deliberate surrender to nonnormative faculty: in essence, a sixth sense. Composed of an array of posters, projections, photographs, paintings, illusions, film fragments, sculptures, advertisements, and apparatuses, the exhibition’s artifacts incite an active engagement of all the senses, diminishing the boundaries between them and prompting a reconsideration of the very nature of perception.



 


Fundamentally, the exhibition’s presentation of objects that appear familiar yet unorthodox offers modern viewers a critical inquiry into a distant past that in itself seems illusive. By the twentieth century, the Spiritualism movement had reached an apex, its tenets firmly embedded in Western cultural consciousness, yet now obscured by the secularity and rationality of the present day. Central to Spiritualism was the belief that wh

Peabody Essex Museum conjures the spirit world in new exhibit




Shannon Taggart spent almost two decades researching Lily Dale, New York, a rural hamlet home to a robust spiritualist community. During one of her visits, she shot a photo of a woman in the throes of a transfiguration session, sitting under a red light to find out if she could see spirits.

“I tried to make a very straightforward image of this woman with her red flashlight,” Taggart said. “Instead, I got an image that showed a second face, which was very synchronistic with the reports of the invisible reality.”

The photo, which appears in Taggart’s book called “SÉANCE,” is displayed at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem in an exhibit called “Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums,” which runs through Feb. 2. The exhibit explores our fascination with the supernatural, featuring art and objects that mediums and magicians used during the Spiritualism movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as work by contemporary artists and magic performances.

George Schwartz, curator-at-large at PEM, said the exhibit and accompanying book of the same name stemmed from his research on Arthur Conan Doyle, Marge