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Alex Grey (born November 29, 1953) is an American visual artist, author, teacher, and Vajrayana practitioner known for creating spiritual and Psychedelic art artwork such as his 21-painting Sacred Mirrors series. He works in multiple forms including performance art, process art, installation art, sculpture, visionary art, and painting. He is also on the board of advisors for the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, and is the Chair of Wisdom University's Sacred Art Department. He and his wife Allyson Grey are the co-founders of The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM), a non-profit organization in Wappingers Falls, New York.
Grey is best known for his psychedelic paintings and illustrations. In 1986 Grey's artwork was exhibited at New Museum in New York City.
Alex and Allyson Grey have worked collaboratively and have openly supported the use of .
Mending the Heart Net, an interactive installation artwork by Alex and Allyson Grey, was displayed at Baltimore's American Visionary Art Museum in 1998–99 as part of the exhibition "Love: Error and Eros".
In 1999, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego held a mid-career retrospective of Grey's work titled "Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey". That same year, Grey was noticed by guitarist Adam Jones of the progressive metal band Tool, who later featured his artwork on their albums Lateralus, 10,000 Days and Fear Inoculum.
Illustrations created by Grey have been selected to appear on albums for musical groups such as the Beastie Boys and Nirvana, as well as Meshuggah and The String Cheese Incident. Newsweek magazine, and the Discovery Channel, have featured his artwork. His images have been printed onto sheets of blotter acid and have been used on flyers to promote Rave events.
Grey's artwork has been exhibited worldwide, including at Feature Inc., Tibet House US, Stux Gallery, P.S. 1, the Outsider Art Fair, the Grand Palais in Paris, and the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil.
Grey has been a keynote speaker at conferences in Tokyo, Amsterdam, Basel, Barcelona and Manaus. In the 2012 book Psychedelia, author Patrick Lundborg credits Grey as "the leading psychedelic artist of today, and also one of the foremost proponents of Visionary Art as a style."Lundborg, Patrick, Psychedelia, An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way of Life, 2012, Lysergia, pg 421
Since 2020, Alex Grey and Allyson Grey have created a podcast that features a variety of topics. Episodes include musings about religion, science, visionary art, nature, meditations, and full moon ceremonies. Mr. and Mrs. Grey have interviewed artists, philosophers, YouTubers, musicians, and PhD candidates.
CoSM allows visitors a place of respite and worship while admiring Grey’s artwork and writings. Other invited artists can display their works at the CoSM. According to CoSM’s website, “The mission of CoSM is to build an enduring sanctuary of visionary art to inspire a global community.”
Located in Wappinger, New York, visitors can stroll the 40 acres while enjoying art by Alex Grey, Allyson Grey, and Amy Senn, to name a few. Alex Grey, Allyson Grey, and various other artists created murals that can be found in the cafeteria at CoSM. The property contains a 10 bedroom Victorian guest home that is decorated with art in the visionary style of Grey. A large amount of Grey’s work is displayed in Entheon, a converted carriage house on the property. The Greys are currently raising funds for the completion of Entheon. Visitors will enter through bronze doors (see below) that display “Creating a Better World” by Alex Grey.
While in Entheon, visitors can also admire Grey’s works Kissing, Copulating, Pregnancy, Birth, Gaia, Net of Being (featured by the band Tool), and Nursing.” Viewers will also be able to enter the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.
Grey's project The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM) first opened to the public in Chelsea, New York in 2004 and drew visionary and psychedelic art fans to the site for four years until its closure in December 2008. The CoSM featured 20 life-size paintings of standing human figures Grey created in the early 1980s.
The Greys reopened CoSM in Wappingers Falls, New York, a community within Hudson Valley.
Grey's work incorporates many religious symbols, including auras, chakras, and with Geometry and in nature, industrial, and multicultural situations. Grey's paintings are permeated with an intense and subtle light.
"It is the light that is sublime in Grey’s oeuvre - which is the most important innovation in religious light since the Baroque - and that makes the mundane beings in them seem sublime, in every realistic detail of their exquisite being".
His highly detailed paintings are spiritual and scientific in equal measure, revealing his psychedelic, spiritual and super-natural view of the human species. Outsider Art Sourcebook , ed. John Maizels, Raw Vision, Watford, 2009, p.82
In 2002, Holland Cotter, New York Times art critic wrote, "Alex Grey's art, with its New Age symbolism and medical-illustration finesse, might be described as psychedelic realism, a kind of clinical approach to cosmic consciousness. In it, the human figure is rendered transparently with X-ray or CAT-scan eyes, the way Aldous Huxley saw a leaf when he was on mescaline. Every bone, organ and vein is detailed in refulgent color; objects and space are knitted together in dense, decorative linear webs."Cotter, Holland, The New York Times, Alex Grey Tibet House review, October 4, 2002
Grey's The Mission of Art, a philosophy of art, originally published in 1998 with a foreword by Ken Wilber was reissued in 2017. The book traces the evolution of human consciousness through art history, explores the role of an artist's intention and conscience, and reflects on the creative process as a spiritual path. He promotes the Mysticism potential of art and argues that the process of artistic creation has an important role to play in the enlightenment of both the artist and the broader culture.
In Transfigurations, published in 2001, Grey addresses his portrayals of light bodies, performance works, his collaborative relationship with Allyson Grey, and their quest to build a Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.
Sounds True has released The Visionary Artist, a CD of Grey's reflections on art as a spiritual practice.
Grey co-edited the book, Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics (Chronicle Books, 2002, reprinted by Synergetic Press, 2015).
Alex Grey has published a 10 volume journal that features his own artistic works and the works of other visionary thinkers and philosophers.
Grey and the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors gallery in New York City were featured in the 2006 documentary CoSM The Movie, directed by Nick Krasnic.
Grey appeared in the 2006 film Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within, a documentary about rediscovering an Disenchantment cosmos in the modern world.
He also appeared in the film , in which he talked about the importance of the substance DMT in the past and present world, as well as describing some of his personal experiences with the substance and how it influenced his painting.
Grey appeared in the 2016 documentary film Going Furthur.
In Variable Star, a 2006 science fiction novel written by Spider Robinson based on a story outline by Robert A. Heinlein, Robinson devotes several pages to his protagonist's discovery of Grey's Sacred Mirrors and Progress of the Soul series, and to using them to enhance meditation.
In 2013 Grey appeared on the podcast of Joe Rogan.
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