Magic: Beyond the Supernatural in Contemporary Art brings together 45 contemporary artists from around the world whose practices treat magic as a living method, philosophy, and way of understanding our shared reality.
I am deeply honored, and honestly still taking it in, to share that my work is included in this new Tate Publishing book: Magic: Beyond the Supernatural in Contemporary Art, written by anthropologist, folklorist, curator, and author Dr. Amy Hale.
That distinction means so much to me.
Magic has never been separate from my creative practice. My work grows through the convergence of ancestral technologies, including divination, dreamwork, and ceremony, with computation, data justice, digital world-making, queer cosmologies, and Indigenous Futurism. Across video, installation, digital painting, and ritual performance, I think of art as a portal, a shield, a site of encounter, and a tool for collective re-enchantment.
To have this work recognized within a global conversation about contemporary art and magic feels profound. It affirms something I have believed for a long time: magic is not simply an aesthetic, metaphor, or historical curiosity. It is a living practice. It can be a technology of relation, transformation, survival, resistance, healing, and imagination.
About the Book
In Magic: Beyond the Supernatural in Contemporary Art, Amy Hale explores how artists are working with ancestral knowledge, altered states, spiritual traditions, artificial intelligence, tarot, astrology, witchcraft, alchemy, and other esoteric systems. The book asks readers to move beyond familiar ideas of “mysticism” and encounter a vibrant field in which the boundaries between art and magic begin to dissolve.
Tate describes the project as a global survey of 45 groundbreaking artists who are invoking ancestral knowledge, experimenting with altered states, and rewriting the rules of modern art history. The book includes artists working across a wide range of identities, cultural backgrounds, materials, spiritual lineages, and approaches.
I am grateful to be included alongside Betye Saar, Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, Myrlande Constant, Renée Stout, Tabita Rezaire, Tai Shani, Zach Blas, Zadie Xa, Edgar Calel, WhiteFeather Hunter, Hilma’s Ghost, Suzanne Treister, and so many other extraordinary artists.
What excites me most is that this is not a story of magic as something hidden in the distant past. It is a book about what artists are doing now, how we work with ritual, spirit, technology, the body, ecology, inherited knowledge, and speculative futures to create new ways of seeing and being.
Why This Matters
For generations, art shaped through spiritual, Indigenous, queer, feminist, occult, mediumistic, and magical ways of knowing has too often been misunderstood, exoticized, dismissed, or pushed to the margins. This book enters a changing conversation, one that takes these practices seriously and recognizes how deeply they participate in contemporary culture.
Amy brings substantial experience to this subject. She holds a PhD in Folklore and Mythology, has researched artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun for decades, advised Tate’s 2025 Colquhoun retrospective, and has written extensively about esoteric history, contemporary magical practice, and art. Her earlier Tate Publishing book, Sex Magic: Ithell Colquhoun’s Diagrams of Love, examined Colquhoun’s fusion of eroticism, alchemy, Kabbalah, Tantra, and spiritual transformation.
I am especially moved by the care and intention Amy has brought to placing such different practices into conversation without flattening their complexity. A global survey like this can help expand who is seen, what kinds of knowledge are valued, and what contemporary art history is allowed to become.
Join the Launch
The book will be celebrated at Tate Modern in London on October 20, 2026, from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. Amy Hale will be in conversation with writer and curator Jamie Sutcliffe, followed by an audience Q&A and book signing. Tate offers standard admission as well as ticket options that include a copy of the book.
Learn more and book tickets through Tate Modern
For readers in the United States, Abrams currently lists the hardcover for $35, with publication scheduled for March 2, 2027; it is available to preorder using ISBN 978-1-917055-27-7.
Preorder the book through Abrams
Readers in the UK can also follow Tate Publishing and the Tate Shop for availability. Tate Publishing’s Bookshop storefront notes that purchases support Tate’s wider program of promoting knowledge, understanding, and enjoyment of art.
Read It, Buy It, Share It
If you love contemporary art, magic, witchcraft, ritual, tarot, astrology, ancestral knowledge, queer and feminist futures, or the strange and beautiful places where technology meets spirit, I hope you will spend time with this book.
Please consider buying or preordering a copy for yourself, for a friend, for a young artist or witch in your life, or for a school, community center, or local library. Ask your favorite independent bookstore to carry it. If buying a copy is not possible, request it through your library and share the book with someone who would feel seen by it.
Most of all, please help us spread the word. Share this post, send the link to a friend, bring the book into your reading groups and classrooms, and talk about the artists whose work you discover in its pages. Books like this do more than document a field: they help create new relationships, new lineages, and new possibilities for how art is understood.
I am so grateful to Dr. Amy Hale for her vision, scholarship, and care; to Tate Publishing for bringing this volume into the world; and to every artist gathered within it. I cannot wait for you to encounter this constellation of practices.
Our art is alive. Our magic is alive. And when these practices are brought together with care, they can help us imagine, and create, worlds beyond the ones we have inherited.
Please read it, buy it, request it at your library, and share it with your community.
Magic: Beyond the Supernatural in Contemporary Art
By Dr. Amy Hale
Tate Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-917055-27-7