Double Vision: The Artistic Lives of Alex Grey and Allyson Grey

Like so much in the world of the artists Alex Grey & Allyson Grey, the choice of the Hudson Valley as the location to exhibit their life’s work was as much an act of faith as anything else.

It’s true, of course, that there were practical reasons for leaving New York City. By 2008, the lease had run out on the Chelsea loft that had previously housed the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM), the name the couple gave to the center that hosted their art and art happenings. At the same time, Chelsea had commercialized to the point that it no longer felt in keeping with the spiritual ideals that had underpinned their work (besides being an art gallery, CoSM is also a nonprofit and an interfaith church.)

“We learned that nothing enduring can be built in a rental,” says Alex & Allyson.

Scouting around for where to go next, Alex found a website that posted listings for retreat centers for sale worldwide. The website, called Find the Divine, didn’t disappoint. On it, Alex discovered a run-down 40-acre former interfaith center in Wappingers Falls, Dutchess County, that the couple bought “with a hefty mortgage.”

The buildings on the site – including a large Victorian-era home and carriage house – were “radically run-down,” they say, and the Greys spent much of the next two decades renovating the site. They converted the carriage house into an exhibition space known as Entheon, which opened to much fanfare in 2023.

Entheon, which comes from a Greek term meaning “a place to discover the God within,” showcases the couple’s extraordinary output of psychedelic art.

The Greys refer to it as a “sanctuary of visionary art,” and it is quite unlike any art gallery I have ever stepped inside. With its austere gray walls and huge bronze doors sculpted with ancient symbolism, from the outside, it looks like the kind of thing Indiana Jones might suddenly come across in an equatorial jungle.

Inside, the attention to detail is extraordinary. Aside from the ground floor, which houses work by other visionary artists, the rest of the gallery is dedicated to Alex and Allyson’s work, with the floors, walls and furnishings carefully designed to echo the artwork on display.

A lavishly decorated room on Entheon’s top floor houses the Sacred Mirrors series, a set of 21 life-sized representations of the human body painted by Alex throughout the 1980s that depict both the physiological and metaphysical systems of which he believes the body is composed.

On Entheon’s lower floors, some of Alex’s best-known psychedelic works are on display, including “Holy Family” and “Cosmic Christ.” His paintings, which have graced the album artwork of Nirvana, the Beastie Boys, and–in his longest collaboration–the rock band Tool, often feature human forms with their skin removed to reveal the anatomy within.

The body’s internal organs and systems are rendered in fine detail (Alex studied the human body in a five-year stint preparing cadavers for dissection), and it is perhaps this mix of anatomical precision and spiritual symbolism that gives the work its power. The paintings seem to radiate energy; the canvases are barely able to contain the intensity of psychedelic colors and symbols painted on their surface.

As I walk around Entheon, it begins to dawn on me that Alex’s work has as much in common with Renaissance religious art as with anything New Age, which makes the art world’s ongoing refusal to recognize his genius all the more confounding. Unsurprisingly, he says that Michelangelo was the artist he first “adored,” admiring his “countless evocations of the body and soul” and “the depth of his anatomical knowledge.”

A number of other rooms in the gallery are given over to Allyson’s artwork, which, while less well-known than her husband’s (Alex’s Instagram account has 1.5 million followers), is just as eye-catching. Preferring abstraction, her paintings are often composed of minute squares that build into beautiful mosaics of vivid color, sometimes accompanied by a mysterious alphabet that she says was revealed to her during an experience on psychedelics.

The use of hallucinogens has shaped the Greys’ artistic output but also their entire lives together. The story of how they got together illustrates this best. It was the mid-seventies, and both of them were art students celebrating the end of term at a party at Allyson’s apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Severely depressed, Alex, earlier that same day, “had asked a God he did not believe existed to give him a sign whether or not he should commit suicide,” says Allyson. At the party, he took a large dose of LSD. “At age 21, on my couch, Alex had a transformative LSD experience. For the entire night, he envisioned being inside a tunnel. He was in black darkness, while ahead of him was a radiant, pearlescent, turning vortex of grey-ness, headed into bright white light. Inside the vortex, Alex saw how all opposites were united by grey. Feeling that this was what he wanted to do with his art, he named himself after the color (his birth name is Alex Velzy).”

“Consider Paul Klee’s concept of the Grey Point,” the couple tells me. “Medium Grey is the only color without an opposite, without a polarity. It helps us imagine that there is also an unpolarized state of consciousness, observing all. This is where we abide.”

The night after the LSD experience, the two young art students met “to drink rum, talk and watch short films.” Following the date, Alex says he made a psychogram, which is a chart that helps you map out different aspects of the psyche. “The day before my date with Allyson, I was suicidally depressed and felt close to no one,” says Alex. “The day after, she was the closest person to the center [of the psychogram] and I realized that reality had shifted for me.”

“We returned together to my apartment and essentially, we never left each other,” says Allyson.

After a stint of nine years pursuing art in Boston, during which time they were married, the couple moved to Brooklyn, buying a loft in Park Slope, which was then “a decayed, addict and crime-filled slum,” they say. The Park Slope loft, which they still own, became the venue for monthly full moon celebrations (a tradition they continue to this day), where friends of the Greys would gather for “a sort of spiritual variety show,” playing music, reciting poems, listening to DJ’s or participating in workshops together.

In New York, they had their daughter, Zena, who appeared with them in some of their performance art pieces, once being nursed by Allyson as she sat on the floor of Lincoln Center Plaza surrounded by 5,500 apples shaped like a goddess as Alex prostrated himself before them.

“A true artist creates because they must,” says Allyson. “A committed artist is driven to make their inner thoughts into outer things.”

In a TED Talk I watched, Alex noted that art was one of the best ways to document mystical experiences. I ask him why he thinks it is important that such things be documented. “Sacred art is a form of theophany, an appearance of God through the mediumship of painting or sculpture and all creative acts,” he says. “If the highest function of consciousness is the mystical dimension, then the highest function of creativity is the revelation of spirit according to an inner vision.”

The couple has retained this commitment to art as a sacred practice ever since that first shared experience with hallucinogens all those years ago. “We have shared a studio for 50 years and we spend most of our time there, together, working on our artwork,” they say. They are both night owls, painting into the early hours every day; their studio is equally divided, with their workspaces occupying opposite walls.

The daytime, meanwhile, is given over to their “social sculpture,” CoSM, which, since its early beginnings, has grown to include a retreat center offering overnight stays and an array of events and workshops.

They are also working on putting the finishing touches on Entheon, whose exterior will be decorated with Allyson’s secret writing and a series of 30 interlocking faces designed by Alex and set in concrete. To do this, they will need to raise $3 million. “The long-term plan is to pass this radically welcoming art church along to future generations to be cared for by those who love CoSM in the name of transformation, love and peace,” says Allyson.

Photos courtesy of Alex Grey & Allyson Grey

Follow/Connect with Alex Grey via Website | Facebook | Instagram

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Follow/Connect with Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM) via Website | Facebook | Instagram

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