Join us on a field trip to McEvoy Arts’ current exhibition, Rituals of Devotion, for a special Gallery Session led by our resident tarot reader, Helen Shewolfe Tseng. In an intimate guided tour of select artworks, and in conversation with curator Amanda Nudelman, Helen will draw from their divination practices and explore the innovative ways artists use tarot cards and other spiritual tools in their art-making.
More about the Gallery Session here: https://www.mcevoyarts.org/event/gallery-sessions-helen-shewolfe-tseng/
About Helen Shewolfe Tseng
Helen Shewolfe Tseng is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, writer, naturalist, and witch, born to Taiwanese immigrants in the Deep South and currently based in San Francisco. Their work is influenced by ancestral and diasporic relationships to place, folk spiritual practices, interspecies collaborations, trickster archetypes, and neurodivergence, and has taken the forms of drawings, paintings, books and zines, writing, rituals, talismans, talks, workshops, installations, participatory works, computational works, and combinations of the above. Previously, Helen was a 2022 Artist in Residence at Montalvo Arts Center, the 2019 Design Fellow at Headlands Center for the Arts, and a 2018-2019 Fellow at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
About the Exhibition
Rituals of Devotion features sculpture, painting, and photography organized to celebrate the rich narratives that surround ritual practice in its many forms. A journey through the sacred, otherworldly, and mundane, the exhibition explores the performance of ritual as a tool for transformation and empathy.
Practices of prayer, pilgrimage, and worship, anchored in thousands of years of tradition, demonstrate a commitment to the divine and the pursuit of enlightenment. More idiosyncratic customs emerge within families and other communities to preserve ancestral legacies and foster closeness between loved ones. Rituals are not only a method for honoring individual and collective experiences, but also an opportunity to revisit and reimagine inherited histories.
Some artworks on view offer stirring and playful reflections on religious mythologies and spiritual symbols to bring forth new visions of old stories. Others channel the power of real and imaginary mystical sites as havens for gathering and communion. Another group of works traverses the boundaries of Earth and the cosmos by drawing connections between the tenderness that exists in human relationships to extraterrestrial beings.
Rituals of Devotion is curated by Amanda Nudelman.