🍷devotional reboot🏺

the entrance to the exhibit - not sure if the ornate gold and renaissance-looking paintings on the ceiling were part of it or a permanent feature of the museum, but the giant sign reading "TAROT!" over the entrance was clearly new _

Verne Dawson (b. 1955) Calendar, 2025 Oil and paper cards on panel North Carolina and New York-based artist Verne Dawson has long been interested in how carefully constructed belief systems and timekeeping structures mediate human experience. While a student at Cooper Union in the 1970s, Dawson studied under Arthur Hill Corwin, whose esoteric theories encouraged Dawson to approach tarot not as a mere divinatory technique but as a method of universal timekeeping. Corwin's book Robin Hood's Barn explores the way in which tarot might have served an egalitarian function throughout history, allowing people of all social classes to keep time without reliance on a higher religious or political authority. Adapting the seventy-eight standard cards into a nonstandard calendrical arrangement, Dawson situates the cards against a planetary backdrop with the green Earth below and a swirling cosmic sky above. _

this is a wall display of cards from several tarot decks: Karen Vogel and Vicki Noble, Motherpeace Tarot; Amanda Lee Stilwell, The New Wave Tarot; Nicolas Bruno, The Somnia Tarot; Cristy C. Road, The Next World Tarot; Kim Krans, The Wild Unknown Tarot; Sola Saar, Solita Tarot; David Gremard Romero, Tarot Yohualli Ehécatl _

Elijah Burgher (b. 1978) Drawings for the Skowhegan Tarot's Cups cards, 2016 Colored pencil on paper TOP ROW: Ace, Five, Nine BOTTOM ROW: Knight, Queen, King For the Berlin-based American artist Elijah Burgher, the fluid meanings of the arcana gave him the confidence to "leap into abstraction" when making his colored-pencil renderings of the Cups suit for the multi-artist Skowhegan Tarot deck. His wager was that when viewing his essentially nonrepresentational images, viewers would connect them to traditional cards while also discovering new information. Burgher used a half-oval as a simplified cup form and followed Austin Osman Spare's system of creating sigils (a magical or symbolic mark that represents a word, name, intention, or desire) by removing letters from a word ("Knight," "Queen," "King," etc.) and turning the remaining letters into an abstracted monogram. Burgher called his Knight "an ironic Lancelot, a show-off trying to seduce you with all the bells and whistles on his phallic body." _

Rachel Pollack (1945-2023) Drawings from the Shining Tribe Tarot, 1994 Ink on paper TOP ROW: Strength, the Hermit, the Tower, the Sun MIDDLE ROW: The World-Shining Woman, Seven of Stones, Ten of Stones, Speaker of Stones BOTTOM ROW: Six of Trees, Four of Birds, Gift of Birds, Six of Rivers An award-winning author, trans activist, and comic book writer, Rachel Pollack is also one of the last half-century's foremost scholars of tarot. She published the now-iconic tarot guide Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom in two parts, in 1980 and 1983, and as a revised, single volume in 1997. In 1985 she wrote the guidebook to tarot paintings by Salvador Dalí commissioned for the James Bond film Live and Let Die (the project fell through, but Dalí completed the work). Pollack published her own deck in 2001, The Shining Tribe Tarot, which features imagery inspired by tribal and prehistoric art. According to her widow, Zoe Matoff, Pollack was searching for an artist to illustrate her deck but, unable to find the right aesthetic, decided to draw the cards herself. Twelve of Pollack's original drawings are shown here for the first time. _

Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) Justice, 1999 Lithograph and collaged elements ("Sparkles" self-adhesive paper) In 1978, after being preoccupied with the idea for years, French American artist Niki de Saint Phalle began a decades-long project: her monumental sculpture park known as The Tarot Garden. Having secured a site - the grounds of an old amphitheater-shaped quarry in Calpalbio, a small town in southern Tuscany - Saint Phalle and a team of artists began producing larger-than-life versions of the twenty-two figures from the Major Arcana. Constructed of reinforced concrete, each figure stands over ten meters tall and is covered with multicolored ceramic and glass mosaics. Saint Phalle saw the garden as her ultimate achievement, and to help fund the project and clarify her ideas, she produced related lithographs from the 1970s through the 1990s. In 1997 she a published a full tarot deck, on view in the case to the left. [deck image is next in this post.] _

Wallace Berman (1926-1976) Untitled, Sound Series, 1966 Verifax collage with transfer lettering Wallace Berman was an experimental filmmaker and collage artist who played a key role in the California art scene of the 1950s and '60s. He was fascinated by tarot and other forms of mysticism, such as Kabbalah and Beat spirituality, and more generally, systems of symbolic knowledge. This collage, produced using the Verifax photocopying method, combines images from magazines and newspapers, many referencing transmission devices like the typewriter, to compare modern technology with tarot as a spiritual method of communication. In the early 1950s, Berman and Cameron became friends and collaborators. They exhibited their work together at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, but the show was shut down and Berman arrested for exhibiting a drawing by Cameron of two magical beings having sex. _

Juanita Guccione (1904-1999) FROM LEFT: Wheel of Fortune, n.d. Gouache on paper Triumph, ca. 1975 Mixed media on paper Since the beginning of her artistic career in the mid-1940s, American Surrealist Juanita Guccione showed an interest in cartomancy. Her early works include copious allusions to tarot and fortune-telling, including motifs of spinning roulette wheels, traditional card decks, and dreamlike, mystical spaces. Between the mid-1970s and the 1980s, Guccione engaged even more explicitly with tarot imagery, creating works such as Wheel of Fortune and Triumph, which clearly reference the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. While remaining true to Pamela Colman Smith's original composition, Guccione replaced Smith's precisely delineated backdrops for abstract swaths of bright color, allowing these hues to heighten the emotional aspects of each card. _

Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) Tarot Deck, ca. 1906 Ink and watercolor on paper Surrealist Racing Forecast Cards, 1936 Privately published by artist Obeah Cards, ca. 1936 Ink and crayon on cardstock Dating to around 1906, the tarot deck of English artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare was recently rediscovered in the collections of the Magic Circle, a London-based conjurer's club. Only Strength, the eleventh card in Spare's Major Arcana, was missing and has been replaced here by a contemporary facsimile based on a historical photograph. While Spare referenced traditional tarot imagery, he used standard playing-card suits (spades, hearts, clubs, and diamonds) alongside the Major Arcana. He further distinguished his cards by activating their edges, allowing certain cards, when placed next to each other, to create running images and secondary narratives. Spare remained opposed to organized occult groups throughout his life, responding to the social upheaval of his era by abandoning the idea of shared systems and creating a symbolic vocabulary that was both playful and opaque. Later in his career he produced other decks, such as the Surrealist Racing Forecast Cards, intended to help pick winning horses at the racetrack. Its title is a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the Surrealists' use of automatic drawing-a technique Spare had worked with well before the Surrealists. _

Andrea Bembo (act. 1431-1469) Visconti di Modrone Tarot Italy, Lombardy, ca. 1441-42 Tempera, gold and silver leaf on pasteboard TOP ROW: The Emperor, the Lovers, Judgment, the World MIDDLE ROW: Male Knight of Cups, Female Knight of Batons, Queen of Swords, King of Cups BOTTOM ROW: Three of Cups, Two of Coins, Two of Batons, Nine of Swords The earliest surviving tarot deck, known as the Visconti di Modrone Tarot, was commissioned around 1441 by Filippo Maria Visconti, third duke of Milan, to celebrate his daughter Bianca Maria Visconti's marriage to Francesco Sforza, the future duke. The cards were produced in the Bembo family workshop and were long attributed to Bonaficio Bembo. Recent scholarship, however, suggests they were made by his brother Andrea. The deck reflects the opulence of court life through its richly detailed trump cards (top row), court cards (middle row), and pip cards (bottom row). Unusually, it includes female knight and page cards, as well as the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity - innovations likely tailored to honor the bride. These additions expanded the deck from the standard seventy-eight to eighty-nine cards, of which only sixty-seven survive today. _