Laura Whitcomb
in conversation with
Michael Carter
Saturday, September 12, 1 pm
Karma
7351 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles
Laura Whitcomb is a curator, art historian, and founding director of Label Curatorial. Her work examines the arrival of Surrealist exiles and Black Mountain–affiliated artists in California, as well as the countercultures, artist-run spaces, and interdisciplinary communities that developed around them. Her research considers hermetic philosophy, Kabbalistic permutation, automatism, and occult cosmologies as operative structures within Surrealism and its Californian afterlives. Recent exhibitions curated by Whitcomb include Dictation from the Other Side (Karma, 2026); Dynaton: Convocation of Radiant Beings (Château Shatto, 2026); Tertium Organum: Traversing Space and The Golden Ratio: A Procession (Center for the Arts Eagle Rock, 2022); Luminaries of Light and Space (LAX, 2022); Paulina Peavy: An Etherian Channeler (Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, 2021). She is the author of Paulina Peavy: Etherian Channeler (D.A.P, 2023) and the forthcoming Bay Area Artist and Poet-Run Galleries, 1949–1965 (D.A.P., 2026), among other publications.
Michael Carter is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher whose work renews the speculative and visionary dimensions that influenced early Modernism. His practice engages with primary sources rooted in spiritual modernism that influenced Western art of the twentieth century. Carter received his MFA from Claremont Graduate University, California. He has lectured at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York University, Philosophical Research Society, and the Ojai Valley Theosophical Lodge. His work has been shown at venues including Hansell Gallery (Los Angeles, 2025); The Floating Gallery (Los Angeles, 2023); Rusha & Co. (Los Angeles, 2020); Nicodim Gallery (Los Angeles, 2017); JOAN (Los Angeles, 2017); and Laband Gallery at Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles, 2017).
