ArtMill: A Story of Sustainable Creativity in Bohemia [book launch]

ArtMill: A Story of Sustainable Creativity in Bohemia (New Village Press, 2025) tells the remarkable story of the founding of the ArtMill center and NGO—now twenty years strong—through the lens of its founder, Barbara Benish. Beginning in the oppressive climate of pre-1989 Czechoslovakia, the book unfolds into a hopeful narrative of transformation, showing how creativity, rooted in community and in connection to the land, can be a force for social and cultural change.

Weaving together themes of rural sustainability, grassroots democracy, and post-totalitarian resilience, this is both a personal memoir and a broader reflection on how art and ecology can instill civil society from the ground up. With no initial funding, in a country still recovering from decades of authoritarian rule, Benish built a life and a movement powered by love of place, local solidarity, and a deep environmental ethic.

Told through essays, photographs, and reflections collected over years of lectures, interviews, and fieldwork, ArtMill is a testament to what can be achieved when art becomes a form of action.

Barbara Benish is a California-born artist and writer whose work bridges environmental justice, Indigenous knowledge, and creative activism. After studying art and ethnology at the University of Hawai’i in the 1980s, she became involved in the Czechoslovak Revolution of 1989 and later moved to Prague as a Fulbright scholar, co-curating the first major U.S.–Czechoslovakia art exchange in decades.

In 2004, she founded ArtMill, an international eco-art center in rural Bohemia. From 2010 to 2015, she served as an advisor to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and is currently a Fellow at the Social Practice Arts Research Center at UC Santa Cruz. Her writing has appeared in multiple books and essays on art and the environment, including collaborations with political theorists Michael Shapiro and Sam Opondo.

Benish’s mixed-media works have been exhibited internationally at venues such as MoMA PS1 in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery in Prague, and museums across Europe.

DISCLAIMER

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Bohemian National Hall, 321 East 73rd Street, New York, United States