Curating as World Building: Women, Occulture, and Ontologies of Wholeness in the ‘Anti-Museum’, 1920-1960
Supervisor: Dr Robin Schuldenfrei
Advisor: Dr Gavin Parkinson
Funded by the Tavolozza Foundation
My doctoral project takes as its focus four female curators who founded avant-garde institutions for the promotion of modern art in the United States between the 1920s and 30s––Katherine Dreier of Société Anonyme, Hilla Rebay of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Alma Reed of Delphic Studios, and Galka Scheyer of The Blue Four. Influenced by the period’s occulture, these women shared a belief in the power of modern art to bring forth a new spiritual futurity in a society disenchanted by materialism.
My research approaches esoteric spirituality as a methodology to these figures’ curation of art and founding of experimental museums for its display. Drawing on the spiritual and spatial turn in recent art historical discourse, this PhD examines female agency in the design of spaces and experiences which mediate the perception of art in the public sphere, building bridges between the worlds of the phenomenal and ideal.
While this project offers a new approach to curating as world building, it also challenges the alterity of both occulture and female agency in modern art history by recentering the perspectives of Dreier, Rebay, Reed, and Scheyer who contributed to the formation of a new transnational and utopian understanding of modernism scarcely acknowledged in its historiography.
Education
PhD History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art (2023 – present)
MA History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art (2021 – 2022) – Awarded High Distinction
Dissertation: ‘Architectonics of Spirit: Galka Scheyer’s Modern Modes of Display in 1930s Los Angeles’
Papers Presented
‘Curating as World Building: Katherine Dreier, Alma Reed, and the Delphic Sisterhood in 1930s New York’, 2nd Year PhD Symposium, The Courtauld Institute of Art, May 2025
‘Space, the Senses, and the Affective Exhibition in the “Museum as Temple”: a comparative study of Hilla Rebay and Galka Scheyer’s Curating as Esoteric Practice, The Aesthetics of Esoteric Practices: Materialities, Performances, Senses conference hosted by Centro Studi di Civiltà e Spiritualità Comparate, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, Italy, November 2024
‘A Comparative Study of Hilla Rebay and Galka Scheyer’s Affective Exhibitions in the “Museum as Temple”’, Graduate Thesis Workshop, European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism, Ascona, Switzerland, September 2024
‘Curating the “Anti-Museum”’: Katherine Dreier, Galka Scheyer, Hilla Rebay and the Promotion of Spiritual Modernism in the United States, 1920-45’, Collecting Her Thoughts: Women Collectors Across Time, Conference, Boston University, June 2024
Grants, Awards, and Residencies
Tavolozza Foundation PhD Scholar, 2023-2026
Researcher-in-Residence, The Luigi Pericle Archive, Ascona, Switzerland, 2024
Scholar-in-Residence, The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2024
European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism Travel Bursary, 2024
Research England Grant, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2023-2025
Goethe Institute Grant for German Language Study, 2021
The Gerard Maurice Doyon Award in Art History
The Thomas V. Litzenberg, Jr. Prize in Museum Studies
Research Interests
European and American modernism
Utopias, theosophy, anthroposophy, and 20th century spiritual philosophies
Total design and the Gesamtkunstwerk
Exile and émigré culture
Women’s voices
Exhibition histories and museology
Artist homes and studios