Women, Art, and the Spirit World – A Talk With Jennifer Higgie, Author of The Other Side

Harvard Divinity School

For Episode 11 of Pop Apocalypse, we welcome Jennifer Higgie. Jennifer is the author of several books, including Bedlam, a novel about the artist Richard Dadd; The Mirror and the Palette, a history of women’s self-portraits; and The Other Side: A Story of Women in Art and the Spirit World, a beautiful and personal study of the relationship between spiritual experience and art in the lives of modern women. In this career-spanning chat, Jennifer and I discuss her early career in painting, what inspired her to write Bedlam, and how the art world changed during her time at Frieze magazine. Then we dive into Jennifer’s latest book, The Other Side: A Story of Women in Art and the Spirit World. We discuss the spiritual and artistic lives of women like Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Ithell Colquhoun, and Hildegard of Bingen. Along the way, we touch on topics like fairies, Spiritualism, gardening, Carl Jung, spiritual ecology, Theosophy, ascended masters, angels, and much else.