EventsThe New Social Environment#700

Alchemy, the Metaphysical, and Psychic Automatism

Featuring Ann McCoy, Olga Spiegel, MM Serra, and Andrew Woolbright, with Bianca Rae Messinger

Monday, November 28, 2022 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Rail Editor-at-Large Ann McCoy, artist Olga Spiegel, and filmmaker MM Serra join Rail contributor Andrew Woolbright for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Bianca Rae Messinger.

In this Talk

Visit Ann McCoy, Paulina Peavy and Olga Spiegel, on view at Andrew Edlin Gallery through December 3, 2022 →

Ann McCoy

Portrait by Phong H. Bui

New York-based sculptor, painter, and art critic Ann McCoy is an Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail. She lectured at the Yale School of Drama Design Department for 10 years, and taught in the Art History Department at Barnard College for 20 years. Ann’s work is included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and others. In 2019, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Prix de Rome in 1989, and a D.A.A.D. Kunstler Berliner Award in 1977. Ann McCoy worked with Prof. C.A. Meier, Jung’s heir apparent for twenty-five years in Zurich. She has studied alchemy since the early seventies in Zurich and in Rome at the Vatican Library.

https://annmccoy.com

Olga Spiegel

Artist Olga Spiegel was born in France while her family was in hiding after fleeing Belgium during the war. She moved to New York City in 1964. Nurtured by psychedelic art, surrealism and science fiction, Spiegel has created a unique visual language where she can present, in her words, “…spaces of wonder that point to ever changing notions of the Universe and our sense of Being….” Spiegel studied briefly at the Académie Royale des Beaux Arts in Brussels before enrolling at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London from 1962 to 1964. Her work has been exhibited widely, most recently in the New York-based group shows Field Trip: Psychedelic Solution, 1986-1995 at the Outsider Art Fair and Psychedelic Landscape at Eric Firestone Gallery.

http://olga-spiegel.squarespace.com/

MM Serra

Experimental filmmaker, curator, author, and educator MM Serra is the Executive Director of The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, the oldest and largest archive of independent media in the world. She has created over 30 films, and the first five were preserved and digitized by the Anthology Film Archives Preservation series Re-Visions: American Experimental Film 1975-1990. Awards include a 2016 grant from the New York Council for the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writings have appeared in Framework Journal, Millennium Film Journal and other publications, and her films have been presented at many screenings and events around the world. Serra lives and works in New York, where she continues to curate programs, make films, and create community.

https://www.mmserrafilms.com/

Andrew Woolbright

Artist, curator, and critic Andrew Woolbright is based in Brooklyn, New York, and is an MFA graduate from RISD in painting. Woolbright is the founder and director of the gallery Below Grand located on the Lower East Side in New York. In addition to curating, he is an Editor-at-Large at the Brooklyn Rail. In 2021, Woolbright curated the show Density Betrays Us with Angela Dufresne and Cash Ragona at the Hole; and curated shows at Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and Hesse Flatow in the summer of 2022. He currently teaches at School of Visual Arts and Pratt Institute and is a 2021–2022 resident at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in Dumbo.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

Dao Strom

Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

https://www.daostrom.com/

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨