Palm Springs Art Museum announces A Queer Arcana: Art, Magic, and Spirit, a major exhibition exploring how queer artists across generations have turned to magic, esoteric spirituality, and occult knowledge as tools for survival, resistance, and world-building. Bringing together work by 35 artists made between 1909 and 2026, the exhibition traces more than a century of artistic engagement with alternative spiritual practices as sources of identity, affirmation, and transformation.

Presented as part of the museum’s Q+ Art initiative, which centers LGBTQ+ artists and histories, A Queer Arcana asks how hidden or mystical knowledge has functioned as a cultural strategy. Drawing on the meaning of arcana—hidden, mystical knowledge—the exhibition considers how alternative spiritual practices have served as a source of connection, affirmation, and transformation for queer artists. Across generations, artists have turned to esoteric systems, divination, ritual, and speculative cosmologies to articulate identity, cultivate community, and imagine new social and spiritual frameworks.