A new USC Fisher Museum exhibit exploring the connections between science fiction, “magick” and LGBTQ+ artists in L.A. drew a crowd of visitors on its first day on campus. The exhibit celebrates the featured artists’ reimagination of the future through multimedia pieces.
PST ART by Getty collaborated with USC ONE Archives at the USC Library and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art at the USC Fisher Museum of Art to host a reception for PST’s first academic symposium, “Sci-fi, magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-nation.”
Danielle Summer, assistant curator at the Fisher Museum, opened the event by introducing the group of about 50 attendees to the history of the Fisher Museum as the longest-standing museum in L.A. focused solely on art. She highlighted the exhibit’s ability to “catalyze campus community communications through art.”
Sandra Jackson-Dumont, founder and CEO of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, said the show is the product of years spent listening to colleagues and communities. Jackson-Dumont said that the collaborative event is “encouraging each other to be curious about the ‘what if’ question.”
“We are motivated and changed by each other,” she said.
Pilar Tompkins Rivas, chief curator and deputy director of curatorial and collections for the Lucas Museum, said she sees this comprehensive, historical exhibit as a “catalyst for what we want to do as an institution.”
Rivas said she believes this is the “start of conversations that we will continue to have in years to come” about underdeveloped and underserved topics and art forms. “With PST we shift and shape discourse,” Rivas said.
Lexi Bard Johnson, curator for ONE Archives and Quetzal Arévalo, brought attendees in to the Fisher Museum for a guided tour.
Viewers were greeted with a wall-wide purple and yellow map of names, films and corporations connected by lines and arranged by the topics “Queer,” “Magick” and “Sci-Fi.” In the museum’s atrium there are art pieces by hallmark contributors, like journalist Jim Kepner, whose work was integral to the science fiction community.
The map is designed to help viewers make the connections between the converging spheres. Most of the content comes from the 1930s, 40s and 50s, but spans up until the 70s.
Johnson and Arévalo first led viewers through the sci-fi room, with emerald green walls and seafoam text. At the center of the room there are two costumes, which are replicas of the first documented cosplay — the practice of dressing up as a character from a media source, usually television or video games — by Forrest J. Ackerman and Myrtle Douglas. Arévalo said this display “honors the legacy of cosplay for people to explore with identity and gender.”
Johnson said that the room represented the sci-fi audience and Queer population as “two sides of the same coin.” Each artist and piece provides a “tiny dive and tiny vignette into how the communities were so enmeshed,” he said. The exhibit explores early alternative thought hubs, like the L.A. Science Fantasy Society (LASFS).
Next, viewers move to the “magick” room — spelled as such to indicate a difference from “magic” — themed with cardinal red and golden text. Johnson describes magick as a rejection of the idea that science is rational and magic is fictional. To those practicing magick and engaged with sci-fi, it is real, according to Johnson.
One inspiration Johnson credited for providing magick with substance was Thelema, a religion by occultist Aleister Crowley focused on how to “do what thou wilt,” or doing what you like as a form of self-discovery. Three watercolor tarot paintings, painted by Frieda Harris in collaboration with Crowley, are on display in the United States for the first time after being transferred from London.
In the last two rooms of the exhibit, viewers walk through a mock dressing room and then into a final white-walled room with a replica temple backdrop. Johnson and Arévalo discussed a final connection between the Queer, sci-fi and magick communities through the L.A. Scottish Rite Freemasonry. The masonry produced shows with men dressed as women, included in the exhibit “as a space for people to play around with things different than what society accepts.”
The backdrop imagery in this final room is a massive blue universe with an orange light orb open in the middle. Stairs covered by a red carpet descend into the orb. The center reads “spes mea in duo est” in glitter text, meaning “my hope is in god.” Johnson, who concludes with the imagery as a callback to L.A. culture, said this is an “exhibition about how you see things…things that become queer depending on who does the collecting.”
The exhibit lasts through Nov. 23. In addition, on Oct. 3, the Fisher Museum is hosting “Radical Imagination, Queer Stories through Sci-Fi Storytelling,” an event with sci-fi experts. On Oct. 29, USC Visions and Voices will collaborate with the exhibit to put on “demonic drag performances” paired with a costume contest. On Nov. 17, Karen Maness will be giving a talk on visual arts and the production of the replica temple design.