The People's Tarot | anniebuckley

PEOPLE'S TAROT

Annie Buckley’s The People’s Tarot (2013)…is a tarot deck from analog and digital collage elements taken from popular media, including figures made from news article texts and contemporary pictures like the Twin Towers destruction and a Laundromat cart. She also updated the structure of the ancient fortune-telling game, making it more gender-neutral and less physically aggressive, doing things like replacing the suit of swords with pens. The resulting deck and accompanying instruction manual allows users to experiment in their own intuitive reading of the past, present, and future. In this way, Buckley gives room for viewers to go from passive observers to active participants in interpreting their own experience of their own third realms.

—Tucker Neel, “The Senses and Society”, Volume 9, Issue 3, 2014, Bloomsbury, UK

People’s Tarot is a multidisciplinary and participatory project that includes 22 original collages, a tarot deck and guidebook, prints, and community readings. The project debuted in fall 2013 as part of "Tapping the Third Realm" at Ben Maltz Gallery in Otis College of Art and Design and Laband Gallery in Loyola Marymount University, traveled to the Hollywood Arts and Culture Center in Florida in November as part of Miami Basel 2014, and was included in “What She Said” at Ace/121 Gallery in Glendale, CA in 2020.

Interaction and intuition are the core of “The People’s Tarot.” The community readings are free and have been ‘sold out’ each time. These intimate personal exchanges take place in what are often crowded, creative settings such as galleries and art walks.

Print Series:

The Arcana, 8 "X 10", prints of twenty-two collages, each image edition of 30 with 3 artist proofs

The Royals, 11 "X 17", prints of the four royals,each image edition of 30 with 3 artist proofs