Paulina Peavy

Peavy lived and worked in New York from 1943 until close to the end of her life. She died in Bethesda, Maryland in 1999, at the age of 98, a witness to nearly the entire twentieth century.

In 1932, Peavy attended a séance at the home of Ida L. Ewing in Santa Ana, Califor-nia, where she claims to have met a spirit/UFO from another world named Lacamo. From that moment forward, Peavy, a university-trained artist, painted with a brush that “moved on its own.” Peavy’s artistic path centered around her convening with beings and forces beyond the visible plane to create her work.

Paulina Peavy was born in 1901 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She graduated from Oregon State Col-lege (OSC) in 1923 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Vocational Education; she completed studies equivalent to an MA at the Chouinard School of Fine Art in Los Angeles before it became a degree-granting institution, and eventually was absorbed into the present-day CalArts.

Peavy’s work was shown at SFMOMA in 1935, LACMA in 1936 and the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939.
Since her rediscovery in 2014, exhibitions include An Etherian Channeler (Beyond Baroque, 2021), Astrocultural Messenger (Andrew Edlin Gallery, 2023), Greater New York (MoMA PS1, 2021), and Supernatural America (Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2022). A monograph by Laura Whitcomb was published in 2023.