Alex Grey is an artist specializing in spiritual and psychedelic art (or visionary art) that is sometimes associated with the New Age movement. Alex Grey is a Vajrayana practitioner. His oeuvre spans a variety of forms including performance art, process art, installation art, sculpture, and painting. Grey is a member of the Integral Institute. 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, aka CoSM, a non-profit institution supporting Visionary Culture in New York City.
Grey's paintings have been featured as album art for the following bands: Tool, SCI, the Beastie Boys and Nirvana. His artwork has been featured on Newsweek magazine, the Discovery Channel, Rave flyers and sheets of blotter acid. His work has been exhibited worldwide, including Feature Inc., Tibet House, Stux Gallery, P.S. 1, The Outsider Art Fair and the New Museum in NYC, the Grand Palais in Paris, the Sao
Paulo Biennial in Brazil. Alex has been a keynote speaker at conferences all over the world including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Basel, Barcelona and Manaus. The international psychedelic community has embraced Grey as an important mapmaker and spokesman for the visionary realm.
Brian Sherwin: Alex, can you recall your years as an art student? Also, at what point were you first interested in visionary art?
Alex Grey: As an art student I was a nihilist existentialist. I dropped out of art school after two years and went to work for Columbus Outdoor Advertising to paint billboards. I sent invitations to the openings of the new boards I painted, calling the work Capitalist Realism, making them part of the conceptual art movement of the 70's. Then I moved east and attended art school again for a year, studying conceptual and performance art.
Focusing on an examination of polarities such as life and death, I observed and documented a dead dog rotting. Later that year, observing the intuitive and the rational hemispheres of the brain, I shaved off half of my hair. Six months later, I shaved off the other half in a ritual performance. Placing the shaved hair on a human brain, I ate spaghetti, took the universal antidote, syrup of ipecac, and vomited onto the brain and hair. I wrapped the entire mess in a bag and called the performance "Brain Sack". These acts tapped into a deeply disturbed but somewhat shamanic search for meaning.
My study of polarities led me to trek to the North Magnetic Pole to perform "Polar Wandering". I found it ironic that the force humanity relies upon to get it's bearings, the site to which all compasses point, is continually in motion, a phenomenon by that name. Returning, I asked God to give a sign because I felt
desperately in need of spirit. Within 24 hours of that supplication I took LSD and experienced the unity of polarities as well as having met my wife, the human embodiment of divine love in my life. LSD was my first "visioning."
After "Polar Wandering", I left art school for good and took a job in a medical school morgue where I prepared bodies for dissection. A student of the subject of consciousness, I felt it was imperative to study the container in which consciousness lives.
