Grant Wallace AMERICAN, 1868-1954

Grant Wallace was born in Hopkins, Missouri, one of 9 children. He set out for New York City at age 19, where he studied and became a spiritualist, philosopher, and medium to past lives, alien life forms, and spirit worlds. Wallace eventually made his way to California, where he worked as an editorial illustrator and reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle. He graduated to editorial writer for the Evening Bulletin and covered the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 among a group of war correspondents that included Jack London and Richard Harding Davis. He wrote short stories and screen plays, including two black and white silent movies. 

Just before World War I, Wallace settled with his family in Carmel, where he began experimenting with telepathy, or what he referred to as "mental radio.” Over the next two decades, he channeled his visions and messages into elaborate portraits, texts, and complex diagrams and calculations. Through his work, Wallace endeavored to prove reincarnation, extraterrestrial life, and the coexistence of the living with the dead, which he documented in a body of bold drawings and gouache illuminations on paper. 

In his recent exhibition review, Alex A. Jones reminds us that Wallace was part of a zeitgeist that aspired to bridge the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by elevating the spiritual consciousness of the western psyche. Institutionalized in the Theosophical, Spiritualist, and Anthroposophical movements, this “new age” mentality encompassed many individuals around the world, including such artists as Hilma af Klint. 

What was once marginalized remains threatening to a modern conception of the avant-garde, namely the possibility that genius is not something one is, but something one might experience—in other words, that creativity is a fundamentally receptive quality. And what was Wallace receiving? The overarching message of his transmissions is a potentially challenging one—in a word, truth. “Is not truth all man need seek?” asks one of Wallace’s spirit guides; “He who would perceive greater truths must keep the light of truth shining behind his eyes.”