Taught online via Zoom
Wednesdays, September 6, 20 ——- 7 - 8:30 pm ET
Wednesdays, October 4, 18, 25 ——- 7 - 8:30 pm ET
Tuesdays, November 14, 28 ———— 7 - 8:30 pm ET
Sunday, December 3 ——————— 5 - 6:30 pm ET

$130 Member Admission / $155 General Admission

What if the alchemical creatures of Hieronymus Bosch knew how to transmute the difficulties of everyday life? Can the gilded muses, conjured by Klimt, teach us how to reach the ecstasy of the senses? Would William Blake serve as a guide to help us revive our relationship with color?

Our relationship to images is reciprocal, an energy exchange in which we’re never really passive. Images activate something within us and can serve as a scrying surface, revealing who we are and illuminating our experiences while giving shape to our blind spots. As such, the art we love can act like a rear view mirror of the self. By unraveling the symbolic material that we see surrounding an image, we are offered a chance to meet our untapped richness.

In this class, designed to harness the power of visual art as a tool for self-transformation, we’ll choose one artist per session, explore their visual world, and use it as a springboard for introspective and creatives games, simultaneously engaging our spirit, mind, and body. By diving into the archetypal themes underlying their work, we’ll playfully gain insights about who we are and where we are at.

Each session will include parlor games, journaling practice, creative assignment, Tarot work, free association, image scrying, image-making and more! Spanning four months and eight sessions, this class aims to reclaim creativity as a numinous, regular praxis, while fostering the idea that our relationship to art and imagination is a sacred one. 

Students will be able to access a virtual classroom that will include an archive of all the videos, extra homework to do between sessions, as well as bibliographical and iconographical resources.  

Although this class is Tarot-adjacent and access to a Tarot deck is nice, students who don’t read Tarot are welcome and this class can be done solely through free-association.

September 6 - Hieronymus Bosch: Alchemical Monsters 

• Imagination

• Transformation

• Magical Aspects of the Natural Worlds 

September 20 - Marjorie Cameron: Bewitched  

• Drawing as a Talismanic Practice. 

October 4 - Pierre et Gilles: On the Altar of Kitsch

• Nostalgia

• Desire

• Modern Mythology

October 18 - Henri De Toulouse Lautrec: Who are we at night? 

• Nocturnalism

• Intimacy

• Theatricality 

October 25 - William Blake: Sweet Delight 

• Color

• Visionary Experience

• Madness

November 14 - Gustav Klimt: The Ecstasy of Gold

• Sensuality/Sensoriality

• Happiness

• Flamboyance

November 28 - David Lynch’s Lost Highway

• Duality

• Memory

• Subjectivity 

December 3 - Louise Bourgeois: Homebody 

• Body 

• Home

• The environment we create 

French-born Laetitia Barbier is an independent scholar, as well as a professional tarot reader and teacher. She earned a Bachelor's Degree in Art History from La Sorbonne University Paris in 2009. Laetitia has worked with Morbid Anatomy since 2011 as a programming director, head librarian, and occasional curator. Her book Tarot and Divination Cards: A Visual Archive was published in 2021 with a foreword by Rachel Pollack. She is the author of the Tiger Tarot Guide Book, a unique Tarot deck by symbolist artist Lori Field. Laetitia has lectured, taught and read cards for various cultural institutions, such as Greenwood Cemetery, Fotografiska NY, the College of Psychic Studies in London or the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Images, in order: Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail), 1515; Pierre et Gilles, Medusa, 1993