I am honored to be an invited reader at the 2026 PRS Surrealist Ball. Please come and support the mission of The Philosophical Research Society, celebrate the centennial anniversary of the birth of Betye Saar, and live a fantastical, alternate dream reality for one magical night!
Mystic Vision is an altar to memory, to intuition, and to the unseen world that shapes our lives. This year’s Surrealist Ball at the Philosophical Research Society honors the centennial birthday of artist Betye Saar, celebrating a century of her visionary practice and enduring influence in Los Angeles and beyond. Inspired by Saar’s assemblage language and spiritual cosmology, the evening transforms the PRS campus into an altar where the personal and the ancestral converge. Guests are not merely attendees, but participants in a collective ritual: adorned as talismans, dressed as relics, embodiments of protection, vision, and resistance.
Drawing from Saar’s use of found objects, iconography, and the charged symbolism of the eye, the evening centers on the act of seeing: seeing beyond illusion, beyond surface, into layered histories and future possibilities. The space becomes an immersive assemblage: mirrors, eyes, and reflective surfaces recur as portals of perception, invoking Saar’s enduring engagement with sight as both protection and revelation.
A central ceremonial moment: the Opening of the Eye: calls the room into communion. A collective invocation honors lineage, protection, and the radical act of imagination, offered in tribute to Saar’s hundred years of world-building and cultural alchemy.
Guests are invited to dress as extensions of the exhibition and assemblages in motion. Think: protective charms, spirit vessels, cosmic eyes, relics of past and future selves.
At its heart, Mystic Vision is about gathering and about creating a shared psychic space where art, ritual, and community intertwine. It is a night to be seen and to see differently. To honor the power of art, stories, and bodies as carriers of meaning.
Proceeds support the continuing work and vision of The Philosophical Research Society.
Purchase tickets for MYSTIC VISION: A SURREALIST BALL