A Conversation on Spiritualism, Feminism, and Art

Conversation between Dr. Ann D. Braude, Director of Women’s Studies in Religion at Harvard Divinity School, and photographer Shannon Taggart, whose solo photography exhibit, "Séance" is on view through December 9 at Opalka Gallery. Ann Braude serves as the director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program and as Senior Lecturer on American Religious History at Harvard Divinity School. She joined the faculty in 1998 after serving as an associate professor first at Carleton College then at Macalester College, both in Minnesota. Her 1996 article “Women’s History Is American Religious History,” articulates her agenda as a scholar committed to creating more inclusive narratives of American religion. In Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-century America, she explores the engagement between the women's rights movement and the religious movement focused on contact with spirits of the dead. Sisters and Saints: Women and American Religion, is a synthesis of the religious history of American women. Shannon Taggart became aware of Spiritualism as a teenager, when her cousin received a message from a medium that revealed details about her grandfather's death. In 2001, while working as a photographer, she began taking pictures where that message was received—Lily Dale, New York, home to the world's largest Spiritualist community—proceeding to other such communities as England’s Arthur Findlay College. Taggart expected to spend one summer figuring out the tricks of the Spiritualist trade. Instead, Spiritualism’s mysterious processes, earnest practitioners, and neglected photographic history became an inspiration. Her project evolved into an eighteen-year journey that has taken her around the world in search of ‘ectoplasm’—the elusive substance that is said to be both spiritual and material.

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Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2047603-0

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