The Public Domain Review

In the 1930s, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, mystic and founder of the multidisciplinary Eranos forum, began compiling a diverse visual archive that would allow dreamers to cross-reference their visions with the entirety of cultural history. Frederika Tevebring explores this grandiose undertaking and its effect on the archivist, as images from the collection began to blur with her psyche.

This 1705 maze instructs Christians on the possible pathways to New Jerusalem (and dead-ends to be avoided).

Book shaped like a rhomboid by Peter Newell, which tells the story of a runaway baby stroller's downhill journey.

Two series of elaborate educational charts, featuring illuminated cutaways and chromolithographic layers, which demonstrate their creator's belief that wonder is the helpmate of learning.

Erotic magic, Black emancipation, gender fluidity, interplanetary spirit realms — these were but a few of the topics that preoccupied Paschal Beverly Randolph (b. 1825), an occult thinker who believed that his multiracial identity afforded him “peculiar mental power and marvelous versatility”. Lara Langer Cohen considers the neglected politics of Randolph’s esoteric writings alongside the repeated frustration of his activism: how dreams of other worlds, above and below our own, reflect the unfulfilled promises of Emancipation.

An exposition on camouflage that believes all animal coloration is an attempt to blend in.

Benjamin Moseley's treatise argues the multitude of benefits that come from drinking coffee, when the beverage was still relatively new to Europe.

As part of the DOCUAMERICA project, which sought to produce a visual record of the 1970s US, John H. White took stunning photographs of Black Chicago.

We are revisiting older posts in our collection to give them some much needed love.

After supposedly stealing 500,000 francs from his bank, the mysterious Victor Dubreuil (b. 1842) turned up penniless in the United States and began to paint dazzling trompe l’oeil images of dollar bills. Once associated with counterfeiting and subject to seizures by the Treasury Department, these artworks are evaluated anew by Dorinda Evans, who considers Dubreuil’s unique anti-capitalist visions among the most daring and socially critical of his time.