Agnes Pelton at the Phoenix Art Museum

Georgia O’Keeffe may be the best known of the modern artists who also happened to be a women. Agnes Pelton, who had a similar education and traveled in the same circles, has remained on the periphery of art history. Thanks to mounting pressure and scholarship about artists who have been overlooked due to gender or race, Pelton is receiving new attention.

through September 8. It travels to the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, the Whitney Museum in New York and the Palm Springs Art Museum, where the first big reappraisal of her work was staged in 1995. In fact, Pelton lived in Cathedral City for most of her adult life.

Agnes Pelton,The Blest, 1941. Oil on canvas. Collection of Georgia and Michael de Havenon. Photo: Martin Seck.

O’Keeffe did not see that show but her own career was propelled by her love affair and then marriage to photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the most zealous promoter of American modern art.

Sand Storm (1932) layers the mists of the storms clouds that swept the desert with an emerging rainbow.

Agnes Pelton, Sand Storm, 1932. Oil on canvas. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville,Arkansas, 2012.504. Photography by Edward C. Robison III.

She was pursuing deeper spiritual experiences through Agni Yoga, a branch of Theosophy. She developed friendships with the Transcendental Modernists of New Mexico, an informal coterie of artists led by Raymond Jonson who sought alternatives to the strictly formal view of mid-century abstract painting. Though she had not returned to New Mexico since 1919, her work was shown with theirs at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. Orbits (1934) shows the stars traveling paths of light at night above the horizon of Mount San Jacinto.

Agnes Pelton,Orbits, 1934. Oil on canvas. Collection of Oakland Museum of California, Gift of Concours d'Antiques, the Art Guild of the Oakland Museum of California.

Through the 1940s, she studied the writings of Krishnamurti and continued to integrate her spiritual beliefs with her painting but also pursued more realistic landscapes of the desert, which were easier to sell. Both were inspired by her long walks through the desert, then still largely undeveloped.

Light Center (1960-61), which attempts to capture the transition from life to afterlife. After her death, her work was dispersed recklessly by distant heirs and her legacy all but lost until the work of art historians in the late 1980s. Her work was included in LACMA’s groundbreaking The Spiritual in Art exhibition of 1986.

Agnes Pelton, Light Center, 1947-1948. Oil on canvas. Collection of Lynda and Stewart Resnick. Photo: Jairo Ramirez.

Pelton was dedicated to channeling presence, intuition and energy into visible form. This is a path leading directly into bad kitsch for many an artist but Pelton’s paintings always hover in the realm of ethereal radiance. You can scarcely help being pulled into their power, as though they operated as visual mantras.