Nine Spiritualist Women Artists to Know

When Spiritualism began as a movement in the mid-19th century, it attracted a host of believers—particularly women, because it granted them powers they couldn’t obtain elsewhere. “I time traveled to the worlds of remarkable women,” writes Jennifer Higgie in the prologue to her 2024 book about women artists of the past two centuries with a spiritualist bent, The Other Side: A Story of Women in Art and the Spirit World. “Women who found solace in the spiritual realm, because the physical one was too hostile to their seemingly limitless talents.”

Spiritualism with a capital S began as a movement in upstate New York in the 1840s, when sisters Kate and Margaret Fox claimed they could hear noises made by spirits. The pair soon became a traveling act, touring the United States as celebrity mediums and hosting public séances. The desire to commune with departed spirits soon spread across the Atlantic.

Artist mediums soon emerged as well, claiming to receive messages from spirits and translating them into bizarre and varied imagery. Some of the earliest nonrepresentational artworks—predating Wassily Kandinsky and other artists traditionally considered pioneers of abstraction—were by women trying to connect with nonphysical realms. “While the individual work of each artist is unique, the women involved in Spiritualism shared the same goal: to use art as a conduit to communicate with, and to learn from, other dimensions,” Higgie writes.

The development of abstract art was linked to spiritual ideas in Europe in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. This was explored in a landmark 1986 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985.” It continues to be surveyed in shows such as the blockbuster 2018 Hilma af Klint exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, which positioned the Swedish artist as a trailblazer of abstraction; the current Minnie Evans retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American art, running through January 10, 2027; and the upcoming “Natural Magic: Women, Art, Sprit Worlds,” curated by Higgie, which will open at Turner Contemporary in February.

Here, we look at nine women of the 19th and 20th centuries who endeavored to commune with the otherworldly and recorded their experiences in their art. “The women surely understood something fundamental,” writes Higgie. “That the way we each make sense of our existence is never straightforward.”

Decades before Kandinsky published Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910), his treatise on nonrepresentational imagery, a British woman was creating completely abstract watercolors and pencil drawings while guided, she said, by spirits. Georgiana Houghton was a trained artist and artistic medium who participated in trances and séances to create automatic drawings in the 1860s and ’70s, sometimes claiming she was guided by dead artists such as Titian, Correggio, and Caravaggio. Assigning ownership of her artworks to otherworldly sources may have granted her the freedom to create her abstractions, full of swirling lines in prismatic color, long before there was an art historical term for them. “I discovered forms, and designs, and distances, that had been utterly undreamed of,” Houghton wrote in her book, Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance (1882).

Houghton financed and mounted a solo exhibition of 155 artworks in 1871 at the New British Gallery, which The Era newspaper called “the most astonishing exhibition in London at the present moment.” The show was a financial flop, though, and her work was mostly forgotten after she died of a stroke in 1884. Fewer than 50 of her works are known to exist today, the largest number held by Australia’s Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, which acquired them after they were brought to Australia in 1910 for an exhibition.

Houghton’s work has been revived of late. It was shown at a celebrated exhibition at London’s Courtauld Institute in 2016. The year before, it was exhibited at the Monash University Museum of Art in Melbourne, and in 2023 she had a solo show at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (timed to coincide with a Kandinsky exhibition and positioning her as a precursor of abstraction).

Early British medium Anna Mary Howitt started out on a traditional artist’s path. She studied at Henry Sass’s art school in London alongside Pre-Raphaelite artists Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, then continued her studies in Munich. When she returned to England, her work received such harsh treatment from art critic John Ruskin that she burned all her paintings and began anew. “She was of an enthusiastic, impulsive nature, more than duly fanciful,” wrote another art critic, William Michael Rossetti (brother of Dante), in Some Reminiscences (1906). “If only the spirits had let her alone, she would have drawn and painted very much better than she ever did under their inspiration.”

Howitt, whose parents were both spiritualists, was an early attendee of séances when Spiritualism arrived in England. Among other motivations, she was hoping to contact her deceased brother, Claude. Howitt began drawing automatically while in a trancelike state and making spirit drawings in 1856, mostly on thin tracing paper. These were some of the first spirit drawings shared with the general public when they were published in a book on spiritualism by her friend Camilla Dufour Crosland, Light in the Valley (1857).

Howitt was a founding member of London’s College of Psychic Studies, and a dedicated exhibition room there displays her artworks, books, and articles, plus a spirit photograph by Frederick Hudson of Anna with her father and what is said to be the spirit of her deceased brother. Other Howitt drawings are held at the Cambridge University Library as part of the Society for Psychical Research archive.

Anna Cassel first met Hilma af Klint, who became her friend and collaborator, when they were students (and possibly lovers) at the Slöjdskolan in Stockholm. It has always been known that Cassel belonged to The Five, a Spiritualist group of women that experimented with séances and automatism, but as more research emerges scholars are learning the extent of Cassel’s contributions to af Klint’s “Paintings for the Temple,” a cycle of 193 works in fourteen series made between 1906 and 1915.

After analyzing Cassel’s notebooks, discovered in 2021 in the archives of Austrian occultist Rudolf Steiner, art historian Hedwig Martin has proposed that of the 26 small oil paintings in the cycle’s inaugural series of 1906–1907, af Klint created twelve and Cassel fourteen. According to Martin, the stylistic differences between the two artists’ hands are apparent in the series (originally called “Series 1” or “The First 26 Small Ones” and later renamed “Primordial Chaos”). Cassel was exacting, her paint applied smoothly with close attention to detail. Af Klint applied paint more expressively, and her hues were more saturated.

Other women were involved in producing “Paintings for the Temple” as well, but af Klint described Cassel—who would later execute two more of the cycle’s series—as an equal and the others as assistants. “The Guru has a message for you, A[nna],” af Klint wrote in 1914. “Your path is nearly ready for you. Your power will soon grow, and you will become a sturdy pillar like few others.”

Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint believed she was making paintings for the future. A blockbuster 2018 retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum (one of the best-attended shows in the museum’s history) positioned af Klint as a pioneer of abstraction, but in her lifetime she sensed that mainstream audiences weren’t ready for her spiritual works. In 1932 she marked paintings that were part of the series “Paintings for the Temple” with an X in her notebooks, signaling that they shouldn’t be shown until 20 years after her death.

Born in Stockholm and trained at that city’s Royal Academy of the Arts, af Klint started out making figurative paintings that were her financial bread and butter. Spiritual artworks were what she made for herself, as part of her larger interest in Roscrucianism, Anthroposophy, and Theosophy. With Anna Cassel she established the collaborative The Five, whose members put themselves in trancelike states in order to receive and record messages from spirits that they called the High Masters. (After af Klint claimed to have received a message stating that she should be the group’s leader, the collaborative disbanded.)

After The Five fell apart, af Klint focused on “Paintings for the Temple,” a cycle of 193 paintings in 14 series that is considered her major opus. She viewed these large-scale works full of bright color and geometric shapes as messages. “The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings and with great force,” af Klint stated. “I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless, I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brushstroke.”

New research, however, suggests that “Paintings for the Temple,” was not created by af Klint alone, but was the product of a collaboration between her and her friends, notably Anna Cassel.

Self-taught French artist Jeanne Tripier became interested in spiritualism later in life, at age 58. She stopped going to work at the department store where she was a saleswoman and instead devoted herself to the drawings, writings, embroidery, and crochet works that she made under mediumistic influence, receiving what she considered to be direct revelations from the deceased (including from figures such as Joan of Arc). Repetition was a common theme in her work, and her methods could be unconventional: The small compositions that she interspersed like illustrations in her writings were drawn with unusual materials such as hair dye, nail polish, medicine, and sugar.

In 1934 Tripier was admitted to a Parisian psychiatric hospital for chronic psychosis, logorrhea, and megalomania, and for the last 10 years of her life she was a patient at the Neuilly-sur-Marne asylum. Often understood within the context of Art Brut, she had a solo exhibition at Madrid’s La Casa Encendida in 2018–19, and a handful of her works are in the Centre Pompidou collection in Paris.

Agnes Pelton’s earliest paintings, from around the time that she studied art at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, were of dainty women in landscapes. About a decade later, in the 1910s, she started making what she called her “Imaginative Paintings,” working in a historic windmill on Long Island that she’d turned into a live-in studio. Some of these abstractions were exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show, and later in her first New York solo show in 1929 at Montross Gallery. In the text Pelton wrote for that show’s catalog, she said she had tried to find “a beauty not for the eye alone, but of a more comprehensive nature, carrying a more direct impact on our newly developing perception.”

In 1932 Pelton moved to Cathedral City, California, where she lived until her death in 1961. “The vibration of this light, the spaciousness of these skies enthralled me,” she wrote. “I knew there was a spirit in nature as in everything else, but here in the desert it was an especially bright spirit.”

Pelton painted curvilinear and energetic images that she saw in moments of meditation, based on her individual belief system. She was interested in Christian mysticism, Agni Yoga, and Theosophy, a religion that combined ancient traditions and the occult into a modern spiritual practice. “Painting was a devotional practice for Pelton,” writes Erika Doss in her essay in Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist (2019), “a means of articulating her spiritual beliefs on modern art terms.”

Pelton was the subject of a traveling solo exhibition that began at the Phoenix Art Museum in 2019 and continued to the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Palm Springs Art Museum.

So convinced was self-taught artist Madge Gill that her artworks were produced by her personal spirit guide, named Myrninerest, that she allegedly turned down an exhibition opportunity at a commercial West End gallery because she believed the art was not hers to sell. Gill said she was first possessed by Myrninerest in March 1920, when she was 38 years old—she’d been introduced to spiritualism several decades earlier by an aunt—and for the rest of her life she drew, wrote, wove, knit, crocheted, and played piano under his guidance. It was Myrninerest’s signature that regularly appeared on Gill’s drawings, which are characterized by repetitive marks in a monochromatic palette. The faces in her works are either self-portraits or images of her spirit guide.

Gill showed these works in her lifetime, regularly participating in an annual exhibition of London East End amateur artists at Whitechapel Gallery between 1932 and 1947. She often made her ink drawings on rolls of calico cloth, working on one flattened segment at a time. The largest of these, displayed at Whitechapel in 1939, was almost 40 meters long.

Gill also made embroideries, one of which sold for $120,600 at Christie’s New York on February 26, 2026—a record for the artist. She had already been in the spotlight two years earlier, when her art was exhibited at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

Her multimedia works have been regarded both as mediumistic artworks and as stemming from mental health issues. Gill led a difficult life, born the illegitimate daughter of a single mother who committed her to an orphanage when she was nine years old. Hardships persisted when she was sent to Canada as a teenager to be a domestic servant. Once returned to London, she had a bad marriage that produced four children, only two of whom survived.

Emma Kunz thought of herself not as an artist but as a healer. As a healer she grew special plants, claimed to have discovered the curative properties of a mineral she named AION A, and researched how to turn harmful energies into healing ones. She also produced mediumistic drawings in a trancelike state, sometimes going for as long as 48 hours without eating or sleeping.

Kunz started investigating telepathic and prophetic skills at age 18. It was in middle age that she began making large-scale geometric drawings on graph paper, using colored pencils and oil pastels and a process that she called radiesthesia. In this process, she used a silver pendulum with a jade tip to create patterns of lines and shapes. “Design and shape as dimension,” Kunz said of her artistic energy field. “Rhythm, symbol and transformation of numbers and concepts.” Colors and shapes held specific meaning for her; she viewed them as a way to understand the world.

Kunz left behind an oeuvre of around 600 drawings. None are titled or dated, and there are no records of their meanings. Never exhibited publicly in her lifetime, they were first shown in 1973 at the Aargauer Kunsthaus gallery in Switzerland. There were then Kunz retrospectives at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, and in 2013 her work was shown at the Venice Biennale.

Working at the same time as her European Spiritualist peers, Minnie Evans started having vivid dreams at a young age and believed that divine sources were communicating with her through these visions, telling her what they wanted her to share with the world. “My whole life has been dreams,” she later told her friend and art dealer, Nina Howell Starr. However, it wasn’t until she was nearly 43, on Good Friday of 1935, that she began translating the imagery from her dreams into drawings, oil paintings, and collages, of which she created around 1,000 in total.

Evans’s mysterious works are dense compositions combining fantastical creatures, meditative patterns, and botanical motifs. Her art draws on Afro-Caribbean culture, mythology, religious themes, and decorative arts; eyes, a recurring image in her work, signify God’s omniscience as well as windows into the soul. Evans claimed that these elaborate works weren’t planned out in advance but rather unfolded organically. “This art that I have put out has come from the nations I suppose might have been destroyed before the Flood,” Evans explained. “No one knows anything about them, but God has given it to me to bring back into the world.”

Evans was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, where she spent nearly her entire life. It was there that she wed and had three sons; she also worked for nearly three decades as a gatekeeper at Airlie Gardens. Evans died four days after her 95th birthday. Her headstone reads: “To the Memory of Minnie Evans Whose Paintings Speak That for Which There Are No Words.”