By design, the Greys seek to express the infinite nature of God, holding and resolving paradox, bringing humanity home to a higher order of vibration. This bold aspiration has been the vision of this dynamic couple, who have been creating their unique form of visionary and performance art together for more than fifty years.

Their art is distinctive. Their colors and style has been emblematic of the psychedelic movement, referenced by integral and evolutionary thinkers seeking for visuals to map consciousness, and now elaborated on by a new generation of visionary artists who, often through psychedelics, create art in ways they hope will awaken humanity to align with the positive energy of creation and leave behind obstructive and destructive ways of being.

The environment of CoSM, which stands for Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, is alive and fluid, with large art structures, outdoor gathering spaces, and visitors coming and going from around the world. The first building you see when you drive up the tree-lined entrance is a 12,000 square foot exhibition building, the Entheon. Entheon means “a place to discover the Creator within.” It does that through its inlaid floors, deep mystical colors, and sacred art. While fully functional now, where visitors can let go in mind-expanding spaces, there is an entire exterior layer of art and sculpture that will be built over the exterior facade in coming years.

The forested grounds stretch behind the Entheon, with structures indoors and out, including a Labyrinth, Wisdom Path, Mushroom Cafe, and Grey House, an event space and guesthouse. Spacious and soft, the welcoming environment shepherds visitors into a contemplation on higher states of consciousness, where it is possible to deeply connect with oneself and let go of limitation, division, and lack.

Alex and Allyson are the elders and pillars of the community, living onsite. Their engaged presence, live art making, instructional programs, and community building create an environment that makes visitors feel they’ve come home. Home, being a place in the heart of the universe, where people can meet in the energy and essence of Love. CoSM, the Grey’s third incarnation of community space (the first being at their previous home in Brooklyn, followed by the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in Chelsea, and since 2009 on these grounds in upstate NY) is a place for creating, learning, and being together at a higher vibration.

In addition to a variety of spiritual and artistic events, programs, and celebrations, each month Alex and Allyson host Art Church and Full Moon gatherings. Art Church engages with the creative process as worship, creating participatory sacred space. Full Moon ceremonies include live art-making, music, dance, worship and spiritual rejuvenation, forming an educational and inspirational ritual that the Greys have been hosting every single month since 2003. “The full moon” they write, “is the symbol of the soul, a luminous circle reflecting a greater light, just as each of us are sacred mirrors of God’s shining presence.” Now with the space at their sanctuary, these monthly ceremonies bring upwards of 300 celebrants from all over the world. Individuals come, drawn by the art, mysticism, and possibility of contributing to a collective multidimensional creation. They leave having found an understanding and supportive tribe.

Alex and Allyson aren’t new to this endeavor of creating alternative ways to be. Elders in the visionary mystical movement that erupted among young people in the sixties and seventies, they stand out for their consistency of loving intent, their unbroken engagement in spiritual and artistic community building, and in their creativity of artistic expression.

Allyson Grey began her work as a photographer and performance artist. In the early 1970s she took LSD and had a vision of a hidden language of letters that speak the language of the cosmos. She saw the unity of all things and how, in essence, there is no division, no separation between animate and inanimate, human and animal, you and me. That vision of profound Oneness, a spiritual insight that showed her an order of living that was possible, has guided her art and life without pause in the half century since. Her paintings, including the Secret Language letters and bold geometric shapes, show order and chaos, evolution and entropy enfolding into itself. At the time of this first profound spiritual experience, she didn’t know anyone else among her artist friends who shared this sense of a spiritual order and cosmic signposts to living from awakened consciousness. That is, until she met Alex Grey.

Alex and Allyson align as soul mates. They share mystical visions, work on paintings together, and have taken entheogens together and opened to the same vision of the profound connectedness and love which has inspired their life’s work together.

The themes of Alex’s art can be traced back to his first self-portrait, (currently on display at the Entheon), penned at age 5 and presciently saved by his mother. His earliest works display him, a skeleton, and a gravestone, a vision fleshed out in his work over his lifetime, illustrating the continuum of life beyond this body, the energy flows of consciousness, the catalytic spark that brings form to life, gives out energy, and merges with the greater universe where there is no birth or death only transmutation of energy and form. His work has been featured in museums, album covers, and stage shows.

Alex and Allyson have become the mainstays of visionary art, bringing together other artists, both established and unknown, to collaborate on paintings, support each other, and find spiritual community. Alex believes that artists can tap into the consciousness of the whole, bringing forth intimations from the future, and help guide us on our way. His powerful and intricate work “Tree of Life” completed in 1987, shows the devastation and greed of our current trajectory on one side and the Eden that can be on the other. On the right hand section of destruction, he included two planes flying towards the World Trade Centers. Following the violence of 911, Alex received various letters from artists, who’d also mysteriously alluded to what was to come on that fateful day in their work, without even knowing it at the time.

What else can we know without knowing, see without seeing, that the artist can bring into focus for all of us to integrate? For Alex and Allyson Grey, this is the question that animates their life and work, the passion to know the Unknowable, to worship through art, bring the sacred into view, and ultimately, to be part of a confluence of awakened consciousness that will transform our world.