HYDE PARK — "Crystal seeing" sounds like cosmic gobbledygook, or something that would cost you $5.99 the first minute and $1.99 each additional minute.
But it is a very real thing, said Dana Major, a Pilsen artist who has been a practitioner of crystal seeing throughout her life.
It’s the family business, so to speak. She’s the great-granddaughter of a table-walking preacher; her cousins were snake charmers.
The School of the Art Institute graduate was reading the "inner light" of others well before she had a name for it. It’s her way of empowering people to be their best selves, her way of giving back, she said.
And it’s this practice that brings her to the Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave., from 1-4 p.m. Sunday for "Front and Center," one of four exhibits opening at the center this weekend. She'll also be hosting crystal seeing sessions every Thursday at the center until Oct. 1, the final day of the exhibit.
Major, whose light installation is part of the exhibit, will treat attendees to a free three- to 10-minute reading. They’ll sit down, place their hands on the crystal ball, ask the biggest question burning inside of them (aloud or to themselves) and receive an answer from themselves to themselves, she said. Afterward, they’ll choose a slip of paper upon which Major will write down a message to take with them.
“This is the strangest thing I’ve done, but this way of looking into people is how I relate to them,” said Major, who left a lucrative career designing functional, formal ceramics to practice seeing and pursue her art.
She has been formally practicing since 2007, after being enlisted to play party fortune teller during a residency in Montana.
“I did this very personal thing for 150 strangers, and later each of them would report that their reading was scarily accurate,” Major said.
There was one woman so moved by her reading that she returned to tell Major she’d dumped her therapist.
“Anything you hear is completely up to you to decide what it means,” said Major. “I’m just the messenger.”
For her, this event is the culmination of years of intense graduate work.
“I’m reading Isaac Newton and studying shadows and soldering my own light fixtures, and what motivates me is knowing that I’m spreading the word, that I’m empowering people to bring their whole selves,” Major said.
Major also has a studio at Mana Contemporary Chicago at 2233 S. Throop Ave.
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