The American LGBTQ+ Museum

Event Description:

Modern witchcraft practitioners and historical narratives alike have referred to “glamour” as a witch’s ability to harness beauty, power, and sex. More practically, a glamour is a spell that can be “worn” by its weaver, a description that conjures new meaning to the function of fashion and the ways in which our clothes are an extension of our energies.

The Center for Women’s History’s exhibition, The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming (on view through January 22, 2023), features two contemporary projects of Salem descendants that each relate to this form of magic: in a 2007 collection honoring his descendant, British fashion designer Alexander McQueen imbued the ‘witch’ with power and sexuality by drawing from fetish and queer aesthetics; and photographer Frances F. Denny’s project, Major Arcana, documents how present-day individuals subvert the taboo of ‘witch’ by reclaiming diverse spiritual practices and redefining ways in which witches harness their glamour.

To celebrate the closing weekend of the exhibition, The American LGBTQ+ Museum and New-York Historical Society’s Center for Women’s History welcomes you to a night of fashion, witchcraft, and tarot reading. Join us for a panel conversation investigating the intersections of fashion, witchcraft, fetish and queer subcultures featuring fashion designer Hogan McLaughlin; Colleen Hill, curator of Fairy Tale Fashion at MFIT; Dia Dynasty, a New York based Shamanatrix included in Denny’s Major Arcana; artist Kendrick Daye, creator of the Queer Black Tarot deck; and moderated by Keren Ben-Horin, fashion historian and Curatorial Scholar in Women’s History.

Stay after the panel to view the exhibition in the Joyce B. Cowin Women’s History Gallery and enter a raffle to have your fortune read in our beautiful Skylight gallery by Justin Henry, author of the Queer Black Tarot Deck Guidebook.