PALM SPRINGS, CALIF.- Palm Springs Art Museum announces A Ǫueer Arcana: Art, Magic, and Spirit, a major exhibition exploring how queer artists across generations have turned to magic, esoteric spirituality, and occult knowledge as tools for survival, resistance, and world building. Bringing together work by 35 artists made between 1909 and 2026, the exhibition traces more than a century of artistic engagement with alternative spiritual practices as sources of identity, affirmation, and transformation.
Presented as part of the museum’s Q+ Art initiative, which centers LGBTQ+ artists and histories, A Ǫueer Arcana asks how hidden or mystical knowledge has functioned as a cultural strategy. Drawing on the meaning of arcana—hidden, mystical knowledg —the exhibition considers how alternative spiritual practices have served as a source of connection, affirmation, and transformation for queer artists. Across generations, artists have turned to esoteric systems, divination, ritual, and speculative cosmologies to articulate identity, cultivate community, and imagine new social and spiritual frameworks.
“A Ǫueer Arcana reflects the museum’s commitment to centering LGBTQ+ artists and the ideas that have shaped queer culture,” said Christine Vendredi, JoAnn McGrath Executive Director of Palm Springs Art Museum. “This exhibition highlights artistic practice as a site of imagination, inquiry, and possibility.”
Organized into six thematic sections, the exhibition focuses on shared histories and creative strategies across time and geography. One section examines occult practices that rose to prominence in the nineteenth century. Original drawings by English occult artist Austin Osman Spare from his influential treatise The Book of Pleasure (Self Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy (1913) demonstrate his theories of automatic drawing and sigil magic, symbolic forms intended to bypass the conscious mind and manifest desire. These works appear alongside contemporary artists such as Elijah Burgher and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, who reinterpret and extend Spare’s ideas.
“Queer artists, activists, and cultural producers have long sought spiritual practices outside the mainstream to affirm their identities, build community, and envision new ways of being in an often-oppressive world,” said David Evans Frantz, Curator-at Large, Q+ Art. “As this exhibition demonstrates, these ideas have found expression in visionary, surprising, and profound works of art.”
Another section of A Ǫueer Arcana explores tarot and its reinvention by queer artists. Original works for The Shining Tribe Tarot by Rachel Pollack, a trans activist and respected authority on divination, are presented alongside large-scale paintings by Devan Shimoyama and Hilma’s Ghost. Shimoyama’s Le Monde (2024) reimagines the Major Arcana card The World, positioning the artist as the central figure in a composition historically interpreted as both male and female, rendered in paint, glitter, rhinestones, and sequins.
Additional sections explore intersections between queerness and Indigenous spiritual cosmologies; sexuality and eroticism as sacred, transformative forces; and artistic practices that bridge spiritual and physical realms through acts of world-making. The exhibition also features an eclectic selection of newsletters, books, and magazines, underscoring the long-standing presence of magical and alternative spiritual practices within queer culture and LGBTQ+ liberation movements. Highlights include WomanSpirit, a lesbian feminist magazine founded by Ruth and Jean Mountaingrove and published collectively from 1974 to 1984, as well as books and pamphlets by Dr. Leo Louis Martello, a Wiccan priest and gay rights activist active in New York City during the 1970s. Together, these materials illustrate how countercultural spiritual beliefs fostered community and inspired new visions of queer belonging.
Artists in A Ǫueer Arcana include: Carlos Alfonzo, Steven Arnold, Nancy Azara, Judy Baca, Elijah Burgher, Nao Bustamante, Cameron, Jayne County, Tee A. Corrine, Frances Salomé España, Russell FitzGerald, Edgar Fabián Frías, Tamara Gonzales, Marsden Hartley, Sadao Hasegawa, Richard Hawkins, Clarity Haynes, Sergio Hernández Francés, Hilma’s Ghost (Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray), Joseph Liatela, Candice Lin, Fred Lonidier, Mundo Meza, Daniel Correa Mejía, Naudline Pierre, Agnes Pelton, Rachel Pollack, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Billie Luisi- Potts, Eric-Paul Riege, Lezley Saar, Devan Shimoyama, Austin Osman Spare, Ingo Swann, and Faith Wilding.
A Ǫueer Arcana: Art, Magic, and Spirit is curated by David Evans Frantz, Curator-at-Large, Q+ Art, Palm Springs Art Museum.
