Joe Szimhart:
artist, author, cult information and behavioral health specialist.
My art contains figurative, symbolic, cubist and expressionist themes
Go to “consultations” on menu above for further guidance regarding intervention, media appearances, lectures, and cult-related problems.
Prices for artworks currently range up to $2000 plus shipping
YouTube Channel: Cults in Occulture
jszimhart@gmail.com
Trust oil 24x36 2013
Background in brief:
Bachelor of Arts and Sciences: University of Dayton, Ohio
Certificate of Completion: painting major, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
Art instructor: St. John’s College; New Mexico State Penitentiary with Project Newgate
self-employed as cult information specialist, consultant and interventionist since early 1980s
Life Achievement Award from International Cultic Studies Association in 2016
Book Review Consultant for ICSA
Primary therapist for recovery house of 24 males in treatment for substance abuse and addiction, 2000.
Crisis Department mental health professional at a psychiatric emergency hospital (retired after 25 years, May 2023)
Certified 988 Lifeline crisis counselor working part time through Montgomery Co. Emergency Service (2024)
Studio artist at Goggleworks Center for the Arts, Reading, PA from 2011-2018.
Santa Fe, Bill Tate, and me: How an artist became a cult interventionist first appeared in 2020. My memoir primarily concerns the years 1975 through 1993 when I lived in Santa Fe. I moved to that major art center after graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to pursue a career. During my first day in town, I met Bill Tate in his art gallery. We became great friends, but that meeting inadvertently opened a door into a world of weird and esoteric teachings. I walked through that door expecting to find enlightenment and salvation. Five years later, I entered a different world—one of cult interventionists, aka exit-counselors and deprogrammers.
In 2016, the International Cultic Studies Association presented Joe Szimhart with a Lifetime Achievement Award for his efforts.
For a discussion with the author and Jon Atack about this book, go here.
New cat to right. Old dog above who passed in Spring ‘24 is with “Wandjina” (36x48), one of a series of 35 Boustrophedon paintings I did from 2019-2020.
To the right are my boots I painted in art school in 1972, a sketch of a cat done in 1990s, an award I won in 2024, and a caricature of me by my old friend Al Chapman in Santa Fe around 1987.
Below is “A Nickel’s Worth” 24x34 oil 2024
Studio scenes
I painted After Altamira (36x48) in 2021. It was accepted by the juror into the Pennsylvania Academy Fellowship annual exhibition that ended in January 2023.
The painting reflects a style I first developed as an academy student in 1975. Its theme mocks a cave painting and includes Picasso’s quip: “After Altamira, all is decadence…we have invented nothing.”
Picasso lion imagery is blended with Altamira imagery and with linear cubist indications. The painting asks the question: Have we invented nothing? Picasso was wryly indicating that after humans emerged from the primal Edenic state of the innocence of animals, we have fallen into a conscious struggle with re-inventing ourselves through technology, clothing, weapons, finer art, and philosophies. Have we accomplished anything?
Wallflowers 40x30 oil Jun 2023 (companion piece to After Altamira) $1500
Daughter #3 48x36 oil 2014 (private collection)
After Altamira 36x48 oil $2000 2023
Entropy 30x40 oil 2022 $900
Mushroom Satori: The cult diary is my first novel published through Aperture Press, Reading PA. The story is not autobiographical.
Based on a composite of my cult cases, the story covers the journey of a college dropout whose curiosity about Buddhism in 1997 leads him to a small Zen commune in Northern New Mexico where he ends up spending ten years of his life.
Discouraged and broken after admitting his mistake, he returned home, only to find that recovering from his experience required far more than merely walking away.
Mushroom plays a role in a character’s name and the dramatic turn in the commune leader’s fate.
Blue Squirrel with Acorn 36x48 oil SOLD
Scapegoat 30x40 oil 2021 SOLD
Lion with Toy Sphinx 48x48 oil 2017 $1700
Award winner at Studio B gallery reception June 28, 2024
Tyger with Bunny 36x48 oil 2017 —- after Wm. Blake’s “The Tyger” SOLD
“Joco" 18x24 oil 2024 NFS
(text/numbers on painting from back of photo) of my father “Joco” (yah’-tsaw)
My father, Jozef Szimhart age 23 from his 1945 picture when he was in the German air force as a Hungarian electrician conscript who rehabbed Focke-Wulf fighter aircraft engines. He was taken prisoner by the American Allies in 1945.
He met my mother, a Hungarian refugee, at a DP camp in Pocking, Germany in 1946.
He became a US citizen in 1956 after we immigrated in 1951. He worked full time as an electrician until he was 90 years old, then passed away in 2014 at age 91.
1939 – Focke-Wulf 190
Green Duck 24x30 oil 2020 $700
Moth Dream 12x16 oil 2012 [SOLD]
Turtlebug 24x36 oil 2017 $700
Trust 24x36 oil 2013 (First prize winner in exhibit for conference on child abuse, Reading PA) $1200
ICSA Today featured an article about Neo-shamanism by me and my art in this issue that can be found here
Left 422 30x40 oil 2014 (First Place award for Billboard contest, Reading PA) $1200
My YouTube channel “cults and occulture” has over seventy short videos.
This one comments on how and why almost anyone could have been caught up in the January 6 capital invasion.
Joe Szimhart has made dozens of appearances on various podcasts, tv shows, and documentaries.
This one by Atrocity Guide appeared in 2023 and features me discussing my work with dozens of people affected by this cult leader.
An image of my painting, Arab with Bread (36x48) appeared in the 2023 Atrocity Guide documentary above, and as a result a collector in Australia purchased it.
At times, my careers cross over!
SOLD
In 1991, Details ran a 5,000-word feature aggressively titled “The New Age Exorcist” about my intervention work by the successful novelist and writer Michael Disend, himself an ex-member of an abusive Zen Buddhist cult in Rochester, NY that he was in for eight years. Mick followed me around for many months encountering several of my cases—all non-coercive. Details editors would not publish the story unless Mick saw something that required “security” to keep a cult member in a house while they talked with me. We finally got a semblance of that when a young man’s sister insisted that her body-builder friends from her gym be present so her brother would not flee right away after she introduced him to me in her home. The story does not clearly state that it took me all of fifteen minutes to get the young man to talk to me voluntarily, so “security” amounted to curious friends who came and went at will with the young man’s permission. The young man chose to leave the cult called The Masterpath, an Eckankar offshoot, on the third day.