A Community Harvest of Visionary Art
Krisztina Lazar, a Bay Area artist and curator, is cultivating an inclusive approach to visionary art education and practice at the Alembic, a consciousness education center in Berkeley, CA. She’s on a mission to expand conventional notions of psychedelic art and build community through producing inclusive exhibitions, art integration workshops, and her personal art practice. Harvest, a group show curated by Lazar featuring 24 Bay Area artists, opens tonight.
Harvest is “a call to reframe things,” Lazar says. “For as much disaster as there is around us, there are so many things that are verdant and beautiful and thriving, literally in our streets and in our cities. When we get so wrapped up into negativity, nihilism happens and you end up denying the life right in front of you.” The show is “a reminder that’s not the whole story, and it’s never the whole story,” says Lazar.
Lazar leads art programming at the Alembic, which includes seasonal group exhibitions and monthly art integration workshops. Her workshops are open to all, regardless of skill level. “There’s something to be said about being really welcoming,” says Lazar, who has produced five exhibits showcasing more than 120 artists at the center since it opened in 2022. “I love sharing work from people that are just getting started alongside people that are very established,” Lazar says. “Everyone needs a start somewhere. There’s no better way to encourage that sort of reciprocity than by being really inclusive in how we show work.”
Her new exhibit’s concept arose during a meditation session while she chanted the Ganesh mantra. “You think of Ganesh as the remover of obstacles and you think of an Indian elephant moving a big tree trunk,” says Lazar. “But there’s another way of removing obstacles, just by existing and flourishing. Forest elephants walk the same path that their ancestors have walked for generations. Their very path of existence creates the forest around them. The obstacles just melt away because you walk your path, right? Flourishing creates this kind of mutual generativity of flourishing. Harvest comes from this idea.”
Lazar invites artists and viewers to think more broadly about what defines visionary art. “If it has a relationship with your unconscious in any way, shape, or form, it is visionary art and you can express that in any way you want,” Lazar says. “Is it a mystical vision? Is it a dream? Is it a daydream? Are you talking to an interdimensional bird who is giving you information? We’re trying to celebrate the fact that non-normative – giant air quotes around that – states of consciousness are, in fact, utterly and 100% normal because everyone has them. Even the people who don’t think they do have probably had a really important dream at some point in their life, right?”
Creative expression “is a way to integrate phenomena and visions experienced in altered states of consciousness, whether they be meditative or entheogenic in nature,” Lazar says. “Visionary art for many people is like, does it contain crystals and bubbles and energy lines? And if it doesn’t, then it’s not defined as visionary art. Well, that’s nonsense.”
Lazar seeks to engage with psychedelic art on broader terms that focus less on visual tropes and more on visionary intent. “It’s getting in touch with that unconscious state and speaking to that vast, giant upwelling of the void that reaches out and connects with us in our conscious state,” Lazar says. “We’re hurting ourselves if we don’t step back every once in a while and look at the bigger picture. There’s a transmission process that’s trying to happen.”
Harvest is on view at the Alembic through November 2 and will be followed by an exhibition spotlighting Society for Art of Imagination, an international visionary art society founded by painter Brigid Marlin. The next installment of Alligator Lizards in the Air, Lazar’s art integration workshop, occurs on August 31.
Disclosure: Charles Lighthouse has consulted for the Berkeley Alembic.