Event – Detail

Part of The Athenæum's new monthly international design series presented in partnership with the Consular Corps Association of Philadelphia.

In Modern Mexico, art and literature serve as a vehicle between magic and ancestral knowledge, one that was rescued and revalued by the surrealist avant-garde. Obsidian Mirrors will delve into the work of:

• Leonora Carrington, an artist who moved fluidly between painting and writing, creating mythological and dreamlike worlds where the everyday merges with the esoteric. 
• Catalan painter Remedios Varo and the ways in which alchemy and mysticism are revealed across her singular approach to surrealism.
• Poet Octavio Paz, whose work offers a key to understanding the capacity of images to contain and release magical energy and connects material production with the notion of art as a ritual.
• Archaeologist and anthropologist Laurette Séjourné, whose book Supervivencias de un mundo mágico demonstrates the intrinsic relationship between anthropology and magic. 
• María Sabina, an emblematic figure of mazatec shamanism,  whose legacy  in combining art, magic, and life serves as a symbol of ancestral wisdom for the intellectuals and artists of the time.

Light refreshments to follow.

Essayist, curator, and art historian, Rafael Toriz has served as curator of various exhibitions of literature, contemporary art, and archaeological heritage in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, the United States, and Portugal. He has been an advisor to Fondo de Cultura Económica in Argentina (2015-2018) and from 2023 to 2024 served as Director of Visual Arts and Exhibitions at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, where he was in charge of the General Directorate of Cultural Diplomacy in 2024. He has been curator of the Guest State section of the contemporary art fair Salón ACME, guest curator of the Festival Internacional Cervantino, and actively participates as a lecturer at cultural centers, universities, and museums inside and outside Mexico.

All event sales are final.