12 week online class via Zoom
Wednesdays, August 30 - November 15
7 - 9 pm ET
$180 Patreon Members / $195 General Admission

Please note: All classes will be recorded for those unable to attend

This course will explore ways in which artists have accessed alternative ways of seeing, knowing, and embodying non-visible realities as a source for their work.

As a pioneer of abstraction in the early 1900’s, Hilma Af Klint channeled a complex and highly original body of abstract symbolic work in secrecy. Accessing spiritual realms has been the subject of early European Modernisms investigations into Theosophy and Anthroposophy, as well as the primary intention of Tibetan Thangkas and Indian Tantra paintings.

How do artists attempt to align the viewer/maker with the contemplative realm, heightened states of consciousness, or transcendence? We will examine a wide field of artists in an attempt to understand the possibilities of the “mystical” and “non-ordinary” states of consciousness in art and contemporary culture, where questions about consciousness and the nature of reality are being addressed with renewed vigor.

Each session will consist of a lecture and discussion, and some classes will include meditations and other exercises. Optional recommended readings will be made available, and all class sections will be recorded.

SCHEDULE OF TOPICS

• August 30: Introduction: Overview of History of Mysticism in Art

• September 6: Intuition and Imagination, An Intro to Hilma af Klint and Theosophy

• September 13: Hilma and Creative processes, Steiner, Continued

• September 20: Kandinsky, Mondrian, Modernism

• September 27: Carl Jung, Emma Kunz, Georgiana Houghton, and Other Cases

• October 4: The Abstract Sublime

• October 11: Tantra Paintings and Philosophy

• October 18: Eastern Influences, Buddhamind

• October 25: Psychedelic Gnosis

• November 1: Contemporary Artists

• November 8: Contemporary Artists Continued

• November 15: Final Thoughts and Conversation?

Jackie Tileston is a painter and Professor in Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches in an interdisciplinary MFA program as well as teaching a seminar "Mystics and Visionaries: Art and Other Ways of Knowing". She has been a practitioner of yoga and meditation for over 25 years, and is fascinated with "non-ordinary" states of consciousness. She spent her childhood as an itinerant “Third Culture Kid,” living in the Philippines, India, England, and France, before moving to the US. She has a B.A. from Yale University and an MFA from Indiana University.

Her paintings are heterotopic spaces in which recombinant strategies and nomadic thinking create complex images that investigate the contemporary sublime and states of being. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Dallas, and group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston), Art in General and the Painting Center (New York), and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art. Tileston is the recipient of the Core Fellowship Residency, the Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2004), the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency (2005), the Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2011) and residency (2017).

Images: Agnes Pelton, “Messengers,” 1932; Jackie Tileston, Carrying the Bloom (detail), 2020