Art Monastery Project

The Art Monastery is dedicated to cultivating personal awakening and cultural transformation through artmaking, spiritual practice, and reciprocity with the earth.

WHO
We are artists who meditate and meditators who make art. We aim to live close to the Earth in order to unlearn the oppressive systems of the overculture and cultivate a viable alternative for future generations.

OUR STORY
The Art Monastery began in 2007 in a series of historic monasteries across Italy as a secular non-profit arts organization. Ever since, we have hosted visiting artists, offered cultural events for the public, and applied the monastic principles of discipline, contemplation, and sustainability to our creative process. In 2016 we moved our operations to a seven-acre farm in Vermont (pictured above). After seven years in Italy, seven years in Vermont, three years in Hawai’i (video below), we are now located in San Francisco. We offer online programs and in-person retreats in various locations, including Green Gulch Farm, Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, and the Berkeley Alembic. […]

OUR MISSION
The Art Monastery is a radical experiment that bridges creative and contemplative practices. Through avant garde monasticism, we take up new and old ways of artmaking to create a social ecology defined by heart-centered, body-positive, justice-seeking values. In this way, we balance the art element of our mission (intuition, activism, and re-wilding) with the monastery element (structure and schedule, personal growth, and ancient traditions). We support each other in our own journeys of artmaking, spiritual practice and reciprocity with the earth.