Hilma's Ghost

  • Hilma’s Ghost, a feminist artist collective, was co-founded by Brooklyn-based artists Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray in 2020. The collective...

    Hilma’s Ghost, a feminist artist collective, was co-founded by Brooklyn-based artists Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray in 2020. The collective seeks to address existing art historical gaps by cultivating a global network of women, nonbinary, and trans practitioners whose work addresses spirituality. Hilma af Klint’s groundbreaking exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2018 served as a reckoning for art history’s blindspots, especially for women artists considered too ‘mystical’ for the conservative art world. Named after af Klint, Hilma’s Ghost believes that western heteropatriarchal societies maintain a false binary between spirituality and science. This bias serves to overlook womxn artists whose explorations of ancient and pre-modern knowledge systems is a source of personal strength and aesthetic innovation. Hilma’s Ghost acts as a restorative project that uplifts these voices and makes them visible. 

  • Exhibitions
  • In 2021, Hilma’s Ghost had their first artistic collaboration with ABSTRACT FUTURES TAROT, which was shown at The Armory Show at the Carrie Secrist Gallery booth from September 9-12, 2021. Their collaborative work ranges from the traditional to the esoteric, including paintings and drawings, surrealist games, a tarot deck, ritual object-based installations, pedagogical online and in person workshops, curated exhibitions, community projects, and books. In the four years of their collective’s existence, they have completed 20+ collaborative projects and participated in 30+ public programs. 
     
    Hilma’s Ghost has been featured in solo and group exhibitions and projects internationally at Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Galería RGR, Mexico City, Mexico; Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT; Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL; The Parallax Center, Portland, OR; The Armory Show, New York, NY; among many others. Reviews of their work have appeared in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Artnet, and Hyperallergic. 
     
    Hilma’s Ghost has been awarded a prestigious MTA Arts & Design commission to create Abstract Futures, a 600-square-foot glass mosaic mural to be installed at Grand Central Station in New York City. The piece inspired by Cosmic Altar, a monumental painting exhibited during their solo exhibition Spectral Futures at SECRIST | BEACH.
     
     
    Sharmistha Ray is an artist, art critic, and professor at Carnegie Mellon University whose work explores abstraction through queer identity and a transcultural lens. Ray’s core practice consists of painting and drawing, and they have also worked with sculpture, video installation, and photography. Their work has been exhibited in 50+ solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally in Mumbai, New Delhi, Singapore, and New York. They are the recipient of a Joan Mitchell MFA Grant and received their MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute. 
     
    Dannielle Tegeder is an artist and professor at The City University of New York at Lehman College. For the past fifteen years, her work has explored abstraction through the lens of systems, architecture, and utopianism. While the core of her practice is paintings and drawings, she also works in large-scale installation, mobiles, video, sound, and animation and has done a number of collaborations with composers, dancers, and writers. Her work has been presented both nationally and internationally in Paris, Houston, Los Angeles, Berlin, Chicago, and New York. She has participated in numerous institution exhibitions including PS1/MOMA, The New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.  
     
  • Works