Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist' will be the first survey of this under recognized American painter in over 22 years. Her distinctive paintings could be described as metaphysical landscapes rooted in the California desert near Cathedral City. Pelton chiefly drew on her own inspirations, superstitions, and beliefs to exemplify emotional states. The publication seeks to clarify the artists significance and role within the cannon of American Modernism but also against the legacy of European abstraction. It contextualizes her work against her contemporaries, Marsden Hartley and Georgia O'Keeffe, and their distinct versions of American spiritual modernism. Pelton?s highly symbolic paintings were inspired by religious sources ranging from Theosophy and Agni Yoga to the spiritual teachings of Dane Rudhyar and Will Levington Comfort. Over three decades she devoted herself to painting spiritual abstractions, which conveyed her light message to the world

"'Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist' sheds light on the artistic contributions to American modernism made by Agnes Pelton (1881-1961), while placing her within an international framework of artists who have worked with spiritiual and esoteric abstraction. Pelton spent almost forty years producing abstract compositions that reflect her interest in esoteric subjects, including Agni Yoga, with its principal focus on fire as a guiding force, and numerology."

• Director's Foreward / Amanda Cruz
• Gilbert Vicario
• Gilbert Vicario
• Erika Doss
• Michael Zakian
• Elizabeth Armstrong
• Susan L. Aberth
• Rachel Sadvary Zebro
• Acknowledgements / Introduction / Agnes Pelton's Spiritual Modernism / Agnes Pelton: Transcendental Symbolist / Agnes in the Desert / Plates
• Women, Modern Art and the Esoteric: Agnes Pelton in Context / Agnes Pelton: A Painting Chronology / Appendix