I'm Allison Seymire, reporting from Brooklyn, and I'm going to tell you about Georgiana often. I'm a writer and I often write about art, and this is based on a story I did for the Data Visualization publication Nightingale and what this artist visualized work was. So decade before abstraction would emerge in art, the new British gallery on old Bond Street and London was filled with paintings, unlike neither did it before. For four months in the summer of 1871, visitors were amazed and startled by the abstract whirling lines in a rainbow of colors that filled each of the 155 watercolor and pencil drawings. All the more shocking, these drawings were created by a woman at a time when paintings of flowers are more acceptable subjects. Plus, she claimed to be guided by the spirits of the dead. Georgiana Hoffton never called her art abstract. For her, it was a visual language, perpetrating an unseen world. Her art was a direct result of her participation in spiritualism, a religious movement in which talking to the dead was central. One of the methods used in spiritual sense is automatic drawing, which a medium's hand was guided by spiritual contact. This was how Georgiana created her art. Two decades before that London exhibition, Georgiana had found solace in spiritualism after the death of her sister, Zilla, in 1851. In her brief Georgiana lamented, I felt as if I should never again use pencil or brush. Through spiritualism, she found a way to be thus reunited to the many dear ones who might have lost, including her sister who would guide several drawings. In spiritualism where women could be mediums and lead sances, Georgiana who chose to stay unmarried, also found a place of power, opportunity and community. At a time when options were women for a few, not welcomed in the art salons, she made her art in sances, rejected by the royal academy and other galleries. She organized and paid for her own exhibition. Most days of the 1871 show, Hoffton was there to share the meaning behind the water colors with visitors, holding up a magnifying glass, the vortexes of color in line. She would explain how they were channeled through her contact with the spirit world. If viewers were to see the back of these drawings, they would find extensive text made through automatic writing. These writings explain the meaning of the drawings and their spirit artists, which included Renaissance masters like Titian and Caravaggio, although Georgiana's drawings looked absolutely nothing like their work. It was important to Hoffton that her visitors would have this context. She had a catalog printed for the show and included an extensive index on color symbolism. She wrote that she offered this guidance not just for comprehension. It was also presented in the hope that many will follow my example and strive to develop themselves as drawing mediums. Some critics were awed by her other worldly drawings, with one proclaiming them the most astonishing exhibition in London at the present moment. Others did not quite know what to make of this art, but it was so different from the rest of Victoria's visual culture, especially with the shadows of the occult. One said that a visitor to the exhibition is alternatively occupied by sad and ludicrous images during the whole of his stay in this gallery of painful absurdities. Georgiana took this in stride, writing that my exhibition baffled them utterly, therefore they sometimes took refuge in unseemly words about what they did not understand. Shortly after the exhibition, she collaborated with England's first spirit photographer, Frederick Hudson. Together, they created numerous spirit photographs with Georgiana acting as a medium. She also encouraged the practices of other artistic mediums such as Alice married Theodosia Peri, who sketched these torrents of enigmatic faces and pencil. Despite the strong attachment to her community, after she died of a stroke in 1884, her work was soon forgotten, a substantial number of the pieces exhibited in 1871 are now lost. The largest known group of her drawings is held by Australia's Victorian Spiritualist Union, which required if they were brought to the country for a 1910 exhibition. It's often in these collections and archives outside of mainstream institutions where work like that of Georgiana survives. Almost 150 years following the 1871 exhibition, she finally received London's acclaim in a celebrated show at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2016, which led critics to ask if she should be considered as the first abstract artist. While Georgiana Hoffton would never have called her art abstraction, it was a protocol for contacting another realm. It's important that the reassessment of her legacy has caused a shift in the understanding of the long dominant narrative about modern art. The art rule may not have been ready for Georgiana Hoffton in 1871, but now we can recognize her singular vision in using art to portray something divine. So I'm going to raise a toast to Georgiana who didn't let anyone hold her back from seeing a two-year world beyond this one.