Workshops

Presenter: Julie Saylor

Description: Do spirits return, and can we communicate with the dead? Baltimore's Spiritualists thought so, but magicians worked to disprove them. Join Julie Saylor of Enoch Pratt Free Library as she discusses spirit mediums, the Spiritualist origins of the Ouija Board, and Baltimore's group of amateur magicians, the Demons Club.

Bio:Julie Saylor has served as a library associate with Enoch Pratt Free Library for over 30 years, in different departments at Central Library. Her current home is the Maryland Department, where she has created public programs about house history, historical cooking, land records, and the history of Spiritualism in Baltimore. She recently published two articles, "The Disappearing Clubhouse," in Perennial Mystics Squared, about the clubhouse of the Demons Club of Baltimore Magicians, and "Benjamin Rush, Spirit Physician?" in The Austin Seance Quarterly Journal, about healing mediums who used Dr. Benjamin Rush as their spirit control.

Presenter: Toya Smith

Description: Description: The presenter will trace the everyday cultural aspects of African Americans and how they are influenced by traditional African cultures which were brought over by our ancestors. How those aspects of culture are, in fact, ancestor veneration and a maintained belief in and participation in an African-based spirituality. It'll cover Black church, music, tradition/superstition, etc.

Bio:Toya R. Smith, known in African Traditional Religion circles as Iya Opan Eguntola Osunyemi, is a mother, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a Black girl from West Baltimore. She is a priestess, a Black witch, a Conjurewoman, a lifelong Hoodoo. More than anything, she is a curator of joy.

Presenter: Orilonise Yarborough

Description: Black concepts of time have never been linear and this shows even more in our use and engagement of public history and oral history. In this talk, I will analyze the concept of sankofa, time jumping and time collapse through the use of oral history and archival research. Through the concept of time jumping and time collapse, I hope to illustrate how the design of oral history projects can support narrators, interviewers and listeners to experience history from an embodied perspective that engages the senses and creates a wrap around experience through voice, frequency, sound and memory.

Bio:Orilonise C.D. Yarborough (pronouns: she/they | pronunciation: oh-ree-low-knee-shay) is a Black queer public historian, writer, curator and creative. They recently received their Masters in Public History at North Carolina Central University, where their thesis work focused on the development of an oral history collection about the history and spread of D.C. Black Pride. Currently, Orilonise serves as the Robert F. Smith Fellow for Applied Public History at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Her research interests include Black LGBTQ histories, Black women's resistance movements, and African American spiritual traditions and practices. A lover of history since childhood, Orilonise's start in the field came through her curatorial work with Black in Space, a collective of Black creatives based in D.C. who held the first virtual Black Pride festival in 2020. Orilonise has worked with institutions such as the Hirshhorn Museum, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture at Duke University, and the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice. As a creative and curator, she seeks to use historical research in creative and refreshing ways, engaging in historical interpretation with the communities she calls home. In the spirit of Zora Neale Hurston, she sees the practice of historical research as "poking and prying with a purpose", allowing curiosity, creativity and connection to community to guide her curatorial exploration.

Presenter: Hess Love

This presentation starts with the origins of Hoodoo during the era of chattel slavery, highlighting its significance as a means of protection, empowerment, and survival for marginalized communities. Hoodoo practitioners integrated botanical medicine, weather observation, more-than-human mythos, and elemental forces into their practices to build livelihoods that honored place-based intangible heritage. Hoodoo was born as a cultural, social, material, and spiritual medicine to adapt to various forms of climate disaster that occurred as a result of colonialism and colonial human trafficking. This talk will center the importance of earth reverence and collective action within Hoodoo, showcasing how shared knowledge and traditions continue to foster resilience and uncover injustices in the face of environmental and social harms.

Bio:Hess Love is an archivist, ethnoecologist, storyteller, healing artist, poet, and playwright. They are currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Wilkes University and pursuing certification as a Master Naturalist. As a co-founder of the Chesapeake Conjure Society, Hess’ creative and community work as a Hoodoo historian lives at the crossroads of culture and environment. Their work is rooted in advocating for communal ways of knowing from systemically discredited people through material mutual aid, spiritual liberation praxis, heritage preservation, cosmovision, and place-based practices in the Chesapeake Bay area.

Presenter: Shannon Taggart

Description: Shannon Taggart first learned of Spiritualism as a teenager after a medium revealed details about her grandfather’s death that proved to be true. In 2001, she began photographing in the town where that message was received: Lily Dale, New York. Her project soon expanded to include séance rooms around the world in a quest to find and photograph ectoplasm – the elusive substance that is said to be both spiritual and material. In this illustrated presentation, Shannon will share stories and pictures from twenty years of photographing mediumship, explaining how two decades of investigation developed into the award-winning book Séance (Fulgur Press 2019, Atelier Éditions 2022). Spiritualism’s influence on art, technology, and politics, its relationship with celebrity spirits, and the religion’s intrinsic bond with photography will be part of the discussion.

Bio: Shannon Taggart is an artist and author based in St. Paul, MN. In a past life, she contributed to printed publications including TIME, Newsweek, New York Times Magazine, Discover, New York, Wall Street Journal and Reader’s Digest. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles, the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, the Robert Mann Gallery in New York, and the Gallery of Everything in London. Her photographs have been recognized by PDN, Nikon, Magnum Photos + Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography, the International Photography Awards and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. Her monograph, Séance (Fulgur Press 2019, Atelier Éditions 2022), was named one of TIME Magazine’s ‘Best Photobooks of 2019.’

Presenter: Lindsay DiCuirci

Description:Mediumship and the intimate practices of the spirit circle drew in some of the nineteenth-century's most prominent abolitionists in America. Spiritualism promised communication between the embodied and the disembodied through mediums and touted the continuous growth and "elevation" of the dead rather than, in the Christian tradition, the finality of judgment. This talk explores the beliefs, language and community practices that fused an interracial circle of spiritualists at 36 Sophia Street, the home of Isaac and Amy Post in Rochester, NY. It focuses on Isaac Post’s 1852 collection of spirit letters, Voices from the Spirit World, Being Communications from Many Spirits, and on Amy's extensive correspondence with Boston-based Black abolitionist, historian and editor William Cooper Nell. Hearing from dead luminaries from George Washington to Napoleon Bonaparte, Post recorded a chorus of regret and expiation, requiring a radical rethinking of the people and accomplishments that merit enshrinement in public memory and space. Post’s iconoclasm was in conversation with Nell’s own historiographic efforts to commemorate and center Black history in mid-century Boston, an effort informed by the conviction that those lionized while "in the body" were not guaranteed glory in the celestial sphere.