Part coffee table book, part essay collection, Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art, edited by Roberto Cozzolino, is easy to immerse yourself in. The book itself is printed in a large format and couples considerable content with a beautiful cover and glossy color printing.

Divided into two parts, the text begins with a series of essays offering context and analysis of selected art pieces and thematic collections. Examples of themes include: hauntology, uncanny spaces, and historical ghost paintings. Single pieces are written about by their artists, like “Destinies Manifest” by John Lota Leaños (24-27) and “Dust” by Tony Oursler (92).

The second part of the text, Plates, moves away from the essays and instead highlights single art pieces. In this section, Cozzolino provides the reader with artist, title, year, medium, and collection, but without the earlier essays. The art pieces within this section are organized by overarching subject, for example: “America as a Haunted Place” (134), “Apparitions” (166), and “Plural Universes” (274).

The two different sections of the text allow readers to pick and choose how they would like to devote their time. One can choose to read one of the essays or spend time looking at individual art pieces. Much as with an exhibition space, curating the book in this manner allows the audience to choose their experience. The more dedicated can read the material accompanying the exhibit, while the more casual can interpret the art through their own experiences.

What particularly makes the text interesting and enjoyable is the approach that Cozzolino takes with curation. The concept of the paranormal in American art transcends the literal representation of the unexplainable. Instead, the use of “paranormal” in the book more broadly explores that which haunts us as Americans.

While one can open the text to find images of UFOs and ghosts, what Cozzolino is offering is much more subtle: visual representations of the specters of our culture. Through his careful curation of both text and art, Cozzolino offers readers interpretations of “deep historical traumas” (12) as being equally as haunting as the unexplained.

Among these, Lota Leaño’s adaptation of “American Progress” by John Gast, which is commonly referred to as the “manifest destiny painting,” has stuck in the maw of this reviewer. While the piece is animated in the gallery space, a series of stills are reproduced in the book along with the artist’s essay on the piece. Taken together, they offer a visual representation of the atrocities of colonialization and the ways in which the history does not always honor the reality: colonists did not settle onto uninhabited land.

The thoughtfulness of the book’s design is an additional high point. Cozzolino chose to include small printings of the artwork discussed in the essays along with larger versions of the same pieces in the Plates section. In doing so, the practicalities of reading the text are much easier to manage: the reader does not need to constantly flip pages to see the references being made by the contributor.

While not explicitly folkloric, the essays and art pieces give the reader an opportunity to engage with interdisciplinary articulations of decidedly folkloristic concepts: hauntings, spirituality, marginalization, power, performance, folk art, and many other communicative practices.

In particular, I recommend this book to those who are interested in the unspeakable. Supernatural America is a concise and well-curated collection of images which, at their core, are tied together by the way in which they document the unspeakable. What is unspeakable changes depending on the artists and their lived experience, but the haunted images within the text clearly demonstrate the way artists wrestle with how to render the invisible visible, the unspeakable spoken.

As April marks the halfway point to Halloween, I recommend spending some time letting yourself engage with the terror that underpins that which haunts us.

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[Review length: 635 words • Review posted on March 23, 2023]