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Forty years after Austin artist Maggie Cook Polacheck's death, her paintings, collages, and pieces of the city's countercultural past are coming out of storage for their first public exhibition. Double Eternity: A Maggie Cook Polacheck Retrospective runs August 7-9 at Blackfeather Gallery, inside the Springdale Station complex at 979 Springdale Rd., Ste. 99, in East Austin.

Curated by Polacheck's daughter, Austin writer, artist, and tarot reader Angeliska Polacheck, also known as Sister Temperance Tarot, the exhibition includes art, readings, and live music. Angeliska was seven when her mother died.

A day before the opening, the exhibition in the small gallery across from the Blackfeather vintage store was still taking shape, with people moving in and out as artwork went up. Scrapbooks filled with photographs, playbills, and other memorabilia were displayed behind glass, while a slideshow will cycle on a television with photographs of Maggie and her work.

Maggie was a painter, collage artist, silversmith, and musician, and she and Angeliska's father were among the original founders of Austin Friends of Traditional Music. Her scrapbooks document an Austin world of music and art centered around places like Armadillo World Headquarters and the Vulcan Gas Company.

She was drawn to Austin psychedelic band Shiva's Headband and taught fiddle to experimental folk musician Ralph White, later a member of the original lineup of Austin's Bad Livers. White has called Maggie "probably my greatest influence," saying she introduced him to musical sources deeper than the radio-friendly fiddle music he had known.

Maggie Cook Polacheck plays violin alongside her husband, Angeliska Polacheck’s father.Photo courtesy of Angeliska Polacheck

Two series of Maggie's collages are in the exhibition: one inspired by English Romantic poet John Keats and another unfinished series that tracks country music legend Hank Williams. Both men died young, as Maggie herself would.

Maggie felt a particular kinship with Williams. She heard his music as a child, and he died on December 31, 1952, Maggie's fifth birthday. Her interest eventually grew into a deep passion for the singer.

Maggie worked on the Williams series until two weeks before her death from cancer on August 8, 1986. She began four of a planned five collages and left detailed instructions for someone to finish them, although her family doesn't know who she expected to take on the task.

Angeliska pulled out a yellow legal pad covered in her mother's neat cursive handwriting. The notes lay out Maggie's vision, down to years in Williams' life, with recurring images of moons, clocks, roads, cactus flowers, and Williams' eyes.

Now Angeliska, herself a collage artist, plans to follow those instructions. She has launched a Kickstarter campaign to support finishing her mother's Hank Williams series.

"It's kind of like ghostwriting someone else's work," she says. "I need to inhabit her perspective in order to do them."

The family knows that some of Maggie's completed work is out there, too. The artist had gifted pieces to friends and other fans of Hank Williams. A press release explains that some of the people who accepted the gifts have since died, and they may have passed the works on to anyone. They hope that visitors to the exhibition will make a connection and point them to long-lost pieces.

The scrapbooks also preserve a version of Austin in which artists could afford an old house on Avenue G in Hyde Park, busk folk music for change, make and sell art, and still have time to create.

Some of that community remains. Austin Friends of Traditional Music is still going, Angeliska said, with longtime members playing alongside musicians in their 20s and 30s. Some will perform during the exhibition.

But a portrait hanging on the gallery wall is a reminder that time is running short. Austin artist and activist Daniel Llanes was one of Maggie's friends, and Angeliska reconnected with him while searching for people who could tell her about her mother. When Llanes died in December, Angeliska said, "it really hit me" that the people who knew Maggie were disappearing and that the project couldn't wait.

"More and more Austin gets eradicated, and people are like, 'The magic's gone,'" Angeliska says. "It's like, well, if you don't preserve it, it will be gone."

"Double Eternity" opens with a preview and book reading August 7 from 6-9 pm. The exhibition continues August 8 and 9 from noon to 9 pm, with live music on August 8. Admission is free.