If there’s magic in the world, it’s in nature, and artist Joan Danziger helps us see it
by Adrian Lilly of Blue Water Communications
There’s magic just outside your walls.
Artist Joan Danziger sees it and hears it when she works late in her studio and listens to the sounds of the birds and scurrying critters outside the windows.
Danziger, 91, has long drawn inspiration from both nature and the magical, merging them in her fantastical art that blends world mythologies with living beings, such as ravens, horses, scarabs and trees. Her career retrospective “The Magical World of Joan Danziger” brings more than 50 years of her art into one gallery. Her horses are frolicking, her scarab beetles are crawling the walls and her ravens — her newest creations — have roosted in a separate gallery to showcase her continued creativity.
Upon entering “The Magical World of Joan Danziger,” you immediately notice two things: the imaginative inhabitants that surround you are at once phantasmagoric and familiar. Joan Danziger’s artwork captures moments: moments of waking clarity, moments of movement, moments of fantasy and mythology.
The retrospective, curated by Jack Rasmussen, C. Nicholas Keating and Carleen B. Keating director of the American University Museum, brings together more than 100 objects that have been largely inspired by surrealism and world mythology.
“My mixed-media sculptures emerge from a deep fascination with metamorphosis, myth and the thresholds between humans and animals,” she said. “I am drawn to the mysterious spaces where the real and the unreal meet — where dream imagery and nature intersect. I think of my art as a transformation between the material world and my fantasy world.”
One of her earliest childhood memories is going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and walking among sculptures and symbols of ancient civilizations.
“I remember standing in the hall of Egyptian art and thinking how they used images to connect with gods, ritual and daily life,” she said. “Studying the importance of mythology in all these ancient cultures did influence my art.”
Among the galleries are 40 mixed media sculptures and 30 works on paper and canvas, showing the breadth and depth of her artistic journey. Her works range from the life-sized, animal instrumentalists “Sunshine Girl’s Love Band” (2008), including Amanda Birdfeather, Bumper Krupp and Gertrude Overnickel, to an unsettling collection of more than 20 glass and wire frame beetles that crawl the walls of the gallery.
“Joan Danziger’s imagination inhabits a surreal world of myth and magic,” said Rasmussen. “This retrospective invites us into her beguiling garden of delights, where her beautifully crafted imaginings are metaphors for our contemplation.”
Early in her career, Joan Danziger took part in artist residencies in Greece, Italy and France that helped shape her views on art and introduced her to other young artists from around the world. While her works flirt with realism, they draw heavily from her start as an abstract painter and her early fascination with surrealism. Each work has an element of the fantastical steeped in secret meanings drawn from world legends and witchcraft. Her works offer an enigma to be puzzled under individual reflection and speculation.
“My main narrative has always been involved with the mysticism of nature and how animals and humans react to each other,” Danziger said. “The detachment between humans and the earth has led us into this current environment crisis.”
Among her many living creatures are the trees, while skeletal and leafless, that seem as much alive as any other creature. The trees were part of her “Mythic Landscape” series, mostly created in the early 2000s.
“I have always believed trees hold ancient spirits,” she explained. “I have spent a lot of time hiking and sleeping among trees and nature. The mythology of trees is universal in all cultures because they are powerful beings of earth and spirituality.”
In her works, she captures how the trees powerfully dig into the earth and grow into the sky. They are protectors of the animals that inhabit their branches or seek shelter under the canopy. She sees the trees as a seasonal reminder of the cycle of life and rebirth.
The idea of rebirth emerges often in her work.
“I am fond of the Phoenix myth,” she said. “A magical bird that bursts into flames and is reborn from its ashes. To me, it symbolizes rebirth, immorality and renewal. I have always imagined myself flying into the sky and being reborn a bird.”
Danziger’s newest creations reside in a gallery all their own. More than 20 glass and metal ravens soar above visitors as they dangle from the ceiling, cock their heads to call to one another, and threaten to take flight, wings outstretched.
“Animals symbolize human connections to the natural world,” she said. “We are not separate from nature. We all exist together. By combining animals, nature and figures together in my sculptures I hope to create a unified world where we live together.”
The raven is of particular fascination to her as it has appeared in myths around the world, from the Native American legend that the raven brought humanity fire to the pair of ravens symbolizing thought and memory, who informed Odin in Norse mythology.
“I work in series like trees, flowers, musicians, beetles, horses, ravens, temples and other subjects,” she explained. The series, she said, create a timeline for her as she looks back at her career. Her anthropomorphic animals lend a whimsical air to the exhibition as they ride bikes, perform somersaults and play instruments while her trees beckon viewers to a netherworld cloaked by seemingly innocent flora and fauna.
In her art, her love for nature is apparent. Danziger’s sculptures of the natural world are a reimagining through mixed media, three-dimensional works. Danziger’s powerful subjects challenge the viewer to see beyond the boundaries of the sculptural form — and to think deeply about what nature means.
Danziger says that artists are very aware of the environmental degradation and the challenges facing both animals and humans. “We can speak out in our art by creating artworks that tell a story about nature and what is happening in the world. Hopefully we might make a difference.”
“The Magical World of Joan Danziger” and “Ravens: Spirits of the Sky” are on view through May 17, 2026, at the American University Museum at the Katzen Art Center in Washington, D.C.
Installation Image Credit – “The Magical World of Joan Danziger”
Installation view of “The Magical World of Joan Danziger” at American University Museum, open through May 17, 2026. Photo by John Woo.