Minds Over Matter: Telepathy and Cold War Conceptualisms

“I take at face value claims that it is possible to transmit thoughts in this manner, from one mind to another mind, without mediation. But what is at stake when artists try to beam ideas directly to their audiences, using mental energies to catalyze new forms?”

In “Minds Over Matter: Telepathy and Cold War Conceptualism,” Julia Bryan-Wilson investigates the eerie promise of telepathy that motivated visual artists and experimental musicians working across the globe in the 1960s and 1970s. This alternative art history maps a relay of artworks by women considered peripheral and men now canonized.

Julia Bryan-Wilson

Julia Bryan-Wilson teaches art history at Columbia University and is curator-at-large at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), where she most recently co-organized the international exhibition Histórias LGBTQIA+ (2024–25). Her books include Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009), Fray: Art and Textile Politics (2017), and Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (2023). She is the recipient of awards including an ASAP Book Prize, a Frank Jewett Mather Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Robert Motherwell Book Award.