Contents

• The Art Monastery Project
• Art Monastery SF
• Our Values
• A Message from Nathan
• Detailed Vision
• 10-year Plan (v2.0)

The Art Monastery Project (www.artmonastery.org)

Vision: to support personal transformation through community, contemplation, and art.

We are an international arts production organization whose mission is:

• To apply monastic principles to art-making and the creative process (rather than a particular religious tradition). For example, by following a daily schedule of shared work, meals, and contemplative practice, our artmonks and artists-in-residence can practice their art with greater depth, support, and resources than they otherwise would be able to.
• To make great art
• To host workshops, short-term artists-in-residence, as well as resident ensembles of avowed Artmonks
• To develop innovative processes of collaborative generation and ritual inquiry, inspired by the world’s monastic traditions
• To host the creation of historic and original works of music, dance, sculpture, painting, photography, poetry, theatre, ritual, architecture, etc.
• To host public events showcasing the above works that transform the artists as well as those in the audience
• To investigate the possibility of art as offering rather than commodity, silence as the source of activity and creativity, and community as social sculpture
• To create thriving, self-sustaining, eco-efficient, contemplative, art communities that connect and empower artist and non-artists
• To develop and disseminate models for innovative art-making, contemplative discipline, and regenerative community
• To explore the creative, contemplative, communal, integral life of the artmonk

The brainchild of American artists Betsy McCall and Christopher Fülling, the Art Monastery Project began with an aim to transform a historic Italian monastery into an international arts production center. In 2010, the Project found an idyllic location in the monastery Sant’Antonio in the medieval hill town of Labro, 70 minutes north east of Rome. The building dates back to the 17th century when it was a Franciscan monastery and now hosts the artists of Art Monastery Italia, top notch hotel Colle di Costa, and the much celebrated Ristorante Ulisse. In 2011, work began on a second Art Monastery in the San Francisco Bay Area [see below].

Committed to investigating the idea of “social sculpture,” the Art Monastery Project continues to develop a wide variety of visual and performance-based art in a way that focuses on the process of creation as much as the final products. Work developed at the Art Monastery will premiere locally before touring internationally.

It is a radical contemporary experiment in social sculpture inspired by tradition: to apply the disciplined, contemplative, and sustainable monastic way of living to art-making and the creative process.  Visit www.artmonastery.org for more information or to get involved.

Art Monastery SF

What began in a renovated convent in Italy, we are bringing to the San Francisco Bay Area. Yes, we’re growing a new community of artmonks.

And while Northern California doesn’t have a crumbling monastery on every hilltop the way Italy does, we do have a thriving arts scene, a host of new and old intentional communities, and a culture that celebrates entrepreneurialism and ground-breaking collaborative artistry. So whether we adapt an urban space or build something from the ground up (or both!), our community will inhabit a beautiful site that adapts various monastic traditions to California’s unique spiritual and architectural heritage. The vision, of course, will stay the same: supporting personal transformation through community, contemplation, and art.

We’re starting with the art.  For the past two years, we’ve been conducting 8-night Artmonk Retreats in the Mojave Desert in Southern California. Each of the public concerts we have given at the end of these retreats has proven our hypothesis that out of contemplative silence can come inspiration, creativity, and jaw-dropping performance. In 2011, we gave our first official Bay Area concert as a part of the Art in Nature: the Nature of Art festival, where we performed sacred polyphony from various traditions in a cathedral of redwoods just outside of Oakland.

A plugin for your community…

Art Monastery SF currently inhabits a small house in the North Berkeley hills, and we’re looking to expand. If you are you part of an existing co-housing community, ecovillage or other intentional community that would be interested in collaborating, OR have access to a large urban space, OR have a lovely piece of land within ~1 hour of SF, we want to talk to you.

To learn more, email Nathan Rosquist, Executive Director of Art Monastery SF, at nathan@artmonastery.org, or call (510) 520 4747. Find us on facebook.

Our values:

As an Art Monastery, we value art. We value the discipline, contemplation and sustainability of monasticism. We value monastic art, and artistic monasticism. We value the process, as well as the final product.

As a business we honor and respect people and the environment. We seek to do no harm. Our profit goes to the common good.

As an organization, we honor the vertical as well as the horizontal. We are an egalitarian community, yet we utilize the effective power of credential, authority, hierarchy, and institution. We believe in transparency and accountability (open communication; checks and balances of power, etc.).

As a community of individuals, we honor autonomy and privacy, as well as self-transcendance & community. We honor paths of personal, interpersonal (community), and transpersonal (spiritual) development.

As artists, we value virtuosic, world-class art, yet we believe that, as Joseph Beuys said, “everyone is an artist.”

As Artmonks, we aim to live at the intersection of the good (ethics and integrity), the true (spirituality and contemplation), and the beautiful (art and creativity), and to serve as a mirror for the world (reflecting its sanity in our rules, while reflecting back both sanity and its insanity in our art).

As part of an order, the International Otherhood of Artmonks, we share our models, tools, structures and solutions with other communities within and without the Otherhood. We act as an autonomous representative of the brand, open-source lineage, and institutions of the Otherhood.

As humans (and as representatives of Northern California), we honor the mystic as well as the skeptic; the hermit as well as the cenobite; the sacred as well as the profane; stabilitas as well as flux; individual religious faiths as well as no faith at all; sexuality as well as celibacy; singleness, monogamy and polyamory; homo-, hetero-, bi-, trans- and a-sexuality; intoxication as well as sobriety; the dual as well as the non-dual.

A Message from Nathan:

Living in intentional community is not for everyone—the idea triggers an autoimmune response in some people, for whom it might signify the sacrifice of personal autonomy and individuality—but once you develop a taste for the stuff, it doesn’t fade. I unabashedly love it.

Since I began this blog-inquiry into monasticism just six months ago, dissecting Taoism, Vedanta, Eastern and Western Christianity, as well as the various vehicles of Buddhism into what I have called the elements of monasticism, community is an element I haven’t written about directly much at all. Yet it figures in my mind as an important piece of what all monasticisms are aiming at. For those individuals who dwell in abbeys, ashrams, friaries, priories, sketes, lavras, mathas, mandirs, koils, gompas, lamaseries, wats, viharas, community is a powerful spiritual practice.

So we’re making a monastery.

No, it’s not the one pictured above—the famous Cluny Abbey, founded in 910 by William the First of Aquitaine—which I include in this post because, although it grew into something massive (such a symbol of opulence that it was destroyed during the French Revolution), it started out modestly enough. William donated his Burgundy hunting preserve and an abbey was born.

Starting out even more modestly, we are making an Art Monastery in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I met Art Monastery Project co-founders Betsy McCall and Christopher Fülling in April of 2008, a few months after they had moved to Italy to start the pilot Art Monastery, and a couple months before I received an MBA in Sustainable Community Economic Development from BGI. I volunteered for the Art Monastery Project in Italy for 17 months out of the next two years.

Last October, I moved to the Bay Area to be with my fiancée, Phoebe, and to start a new Art Monastery here. Since then, between the 8-night Artmonk Retreat and four chapter meetings in Berkeley and San Francisco, after conversations with Phoebe, Joel, Michelle, Tom, Nancy, Annette, Derek, David, Lesley, Eden, and a dozen others, I have a rough idea for how to make it happen.

As I learned in Italy, birthing a self-sustaining community of monastically-inspired artists is an almost unbearably hard and tortuous process. Yet, as far as I and a few others are concerned, there’s nothing more valuable, nothing worthier of our time and our steady effort (aside from, perhaps, our continuing practices of contemplation and art-making).

This is a living document:

Vision: Discipline, Creativity, Sustainability ¹

Simply put, we envision a self-sustaining community of artmonks in the Bay Area.

This community (of 30-40 long-term and 10-20 short-term residents) will live an experimentally-monastic life together: through a shared routine, shared rituals and celebrations, shared contemplative time (if not shared contemplative object), shared meals, periods of silence, retreat, and philosophical debate, shared monastic rule (community agreements) and vows (statement of personal intention), and the guidance of tripartite leadership team (an abbess or abbott, a spiritual director, and an artistic director), developing together an open-source art monastic lineage (e.g. the Otherhood of Artmonks) in close affiliation with the Italian pilot Art Monastery and other Artmonk chapters around the globe.

We will inhabit a beautiful monastic site (an existing one or a newly built one that is architecturally inspired by monastic tradition, yet which honors California’s weirdspiritual architectural heritage) located within a two-hour drive of San Francisco or fifteen minutes away from a BART stop. This site will have private spaces for living, performance and gallery spaces, musical practice spaces, a vast garden, kitchen & dining hall. We will collaborate and perhaps even share space with existing local arts and academic institutions (e.g. the Graduate Theological Union here in Berkeley).

We will create world-class art (through e.g. a resident theater company, dance company, musical ensembles, visual art installations, sculpture gardens, a poetry and literature publishing house, a film residency) together.

What kind of art will it be? The kind of art that could best happen in an Art Monastery in California.

Monastic Business

As a source of revenue for the Bay Area Art Monastery (and eventually for the larger network of Art Monasteries), Artmonks Nathan Rosquist and David Peterson have developed an old monastic recipe for “Lauro,” an exquisite bay leaf liqueur.

By the end of 2011, Bay Area retailers, bars and restaurants will sell Lauro. Every dollar of profit from the production of Lauro will go to furthering the vision of the Art Monastery in the Bay Area. Other sources of income include performances, workshops, and retreats.

From the Ground Up

“I have one word of advice,” my friend and adviser Joel Levey said to me a couple months ago as I was talking to him about this grand project: “Pacing.”

Five Parallel Tracks of Development

The creation of our monastery will happen as a result of five parallel tracks (in order of initial importance):

1. Income (e.g. business unit and revenue stream development)
2. Community (e.g. the Artmonks that live there; weekly artmonk sangha/liturgy lab; quarterly chapter dinners)
3. Context (e.g historical and place-based research & theory: “What does an Art Monastery in Northern California look like?”; affiliations with existing institutions)
4. Art (e.g building artistic credibility through performances and works)
5. Site (e.g. land & buildings)

Email nathan@artmonastery.org or call (510) 520 4747 to get involved

Originally a blog post (read comments here)

Creating an Art Monastery by Nathan Rosquist is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.artmonastery.org.

Notes: