Sears-Peyton Gallery is pleased to present a Project room exhibition of graphite drawings by Roz Leibowitz. This exhibition is a celebration of a beloved series of drawings that Leibowitz created from 2001-2010. The artist describes this series in the following statement.

"I have a collection of 19th century fortune telling cards. One deck has handwritten notes written along the four edges. Think of a crow, the sky will turn pink, a hidden coin points to salvation, to hold eggs means to court vexation, of all your riders one will surely return. I like to think that the woman who wrote these began with a sturdy hand and a light heart only to finish with the kind of breathlessness that comes from realizing what was once nonsense can suddenly become true. And what was once a game can often become a portal to the another, more urgent realm.

My work is influenced by that woman and the Victorian romantic sensibility and the pseudo sciences of the period: mesmerism, table rapping, spirit photography, phrenology, mental healing, spiritualism. All of these flourished at a time when the industrial/scientific outlook became the dominate western view. The fact that these so-called fringe movements were led by women is not lost on me. The women in my drawings act as conduits to this shadow world. I consider them characters playing out their roles in an alternative reality, a reality that is still available to all of us if we open our imaginations in the truest romantic sense.

I worked for years as a librarian and am an avid collector of the past, particularly books and ephemera from the nineteenth century occult. Most of the paper in my drawings comes from ledgers or letters or diaries culled from my collection. I feel at home working on papers that bring the past into the present. In this series, I use the simplest of media-a pencil-to create veils of intricate patterns and decorations. I make use of formal devices such as borders and captions to mimic Victorian illustrations. I consider my small drawings as pages loosed from a long dreamy novel, and my hope is that the reader or viewer will catch glimpses of this odd narrative and want to read on."

(Text by Roz Leibowitz, 2026)