Modern science and technology have done little to tamp down the public’s long-held fascination with UFOs, unexplained phenomena, and the possibility of life beyond Earth. If anything, this millennia-old obsession has only accelerated in recent years, as the Pentagon has declassified files on strange objects seen from Navy cockpits and Silicon Valley giants have spent billions of dollars chasing their own interplanetary ambitions.
The mysteries of the galaxy still vastly outweigh the knowns, and two shows in New York this winter tap into this perennial puzzle. “Voice of Space: UFOs and Paranormal Phenomena” at the Drawing Center (on view through February 1, 2026) gathers some three dozen works by artists ranging from René Magritte to Isa Genzken. “Paintings Made for Aliens Above” at P.P.O.W (on view through December 20, 2025), a solo exhibition of new paintings by Romanian artist Hortensia Mi Kafchin, probes the promises and failures of technofuturism.
Together, these exhibitions show how the allure of unidentified phenomena and the technology that might propel them are bound up with our own shifting belief systems—as well as how the cosmic can open a space to explore queerness, speculative worlds, and flashes of utopia glimpsed through dystopia.
Channeling UFOs
Unidentified objects in the sky have riveted artists since antiquity, with irregular planetary movements, meteor showers, and comets often treated as divine omens. On April 14, 1561, for example, people in Nuremberg famously reported seeing an aerial clash of mysterious globes, rods, and crosses. A blood-red aurora over Britain on March 6, 1716, was read as a celestial war between supernatural soldiers. Newtonian physics has since explained some of these phenomena—for instance, Halley’s Comet is now a known quantity with a predictable return date rather than a bizarre nocturnal anomaly heralding the fall of empires—but the skies have remained charged with artistic inspiration nonetheless.
One classic example is René Magritte’s Voice of Space (1931), on loan from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Last exhibited in New York in 1965, the painting is the conceptual lodestar of the Drawing Center’s show of the same name. Described by the curator Olivia Shao as “the Mona Lisa of UFO paintings,” the canvas features three oversized silver orbs floating over a bucolic landscape, their smooth metallic forms eerily foretelling the countless visualizations of alien spacecraft that followed.
Although Magritte never described the work as being about aliens—he said the forms were inspired by the crotal bells common on horse-drawn vehicles of the period—other artists in the show embrace far more direct encounters with cosmic visitors. One such example is the 20th-century artist Paulina Peavy, whose multimedia works combine enigmatic figures and abstraction in the style of Italian futurism. Peavy’s works are often dually credited to her and Lacamo, a personal UFO that Peavy claimed to have met after attending a séance in 1932. Peavy, who died in 1998, even made bejeweled “trance masks” to better channel her extraterrestrial collaborator, while her multidimensional cosmology became a way to imagine a post-gender utopia far from the conservative reality of mid-century America.
More contemporary works eschew the channeling of possibilities for the visualization of present-day thinking. Also on view at the Drawing Center are two collages by Char Jeré, whose works interrogate the presumed worldview behind technology and consumerism. In an email, Jeré describes a potential unidentified encounter at a reservoir in upstate New York in 2001 as a partial inspiration.
The resulting collages feature everyday objects ranging from sandpaper and balloons to emergency medication and more. Jeré (who uses they/them pronouns) describes the works as “maps and incantations” ultimately intended to decolonize the present. “Like Gil Scott Heron points out in his anthem ‘Whitey on the Moon,’ we suffer in order for technological spectacle and scientific triumph to exist,” they say. “These collages resist the ‘wait your turn’ detritus that so often gets thrown at Black people, queer people, [and] people who have been marginalized.”
- J. Cabelle Ahn