There is a free gallery show in Tribeca right now about women who painted what they said was talking back to them. Conduits of the Unseen: Women Artists Imagine Other Worlds collects eighteen artists across the twentieth century who gave form to spirits, cosmic forces, and other planes of consciousness — mediums working through séance and spirit contact on one end, Surrealists building alternate realities on canvas on the other.
The practical details:
- On view Sept. 9 – Oct. 31, 2026, weekdays 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
- Andrew Edlin Gallery, 392 Broadway, 2nd Floor (Tribeca) — (212) 206-9723
- Free. No ticket, no registration, no timed entry
- Centerpiece — Paulina Peavy, who channeled decades of paintings, drawings, and masks through a spirit guide she called Lacamo
- Also in the show — Agatha Wojciechowsky, Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Agnes Pelton
- Curated by Susan L. Aberth of Bard College
Carrington and Fini are the names most people will recognize; Pelton, the American transcendentalist who spent her last decades painting desert abstractions in Cathedral City, is the one worth standing in front of longest. The through-line the show draws is that these were not hobbyists of the occult — Wojciechowsky and Peavy built sustained, decades-long bodies of work inside their practices, and the Surrealists around them took the same material seriously as painting.
The argument for going is simple economics: this is a substantial group show with real museum-lender pieces, in a commercial gallery, free, on weekday afternoons, for the next six weeks. A gallery visit costs nothing but the walk, and 392 Broadway puts you between Canal and Walker — SoHo, the lower Tribeca galleries, and a decent coffee are all within a few blocks. Weekday hours also mean it is quiet, which is the point with work that asks you to look slowly.