Artmill: A Case Study in Sustainable Creativity

The story starts in totalitarian darkness (Czechoslovakia before 1989) and gradually lays out a groundwork for how creativity within community can influence and change society. All of this is rooted in the connection to the natural world, be it local sustainable farming practices, rural innovations, or international policies with governmental bodies on the global level. The book is a success story for a female artist (the author) who found a way to build a life in a rural, posttotalitarian, foreign country, with virtually no income, through her love of the place. It is a testament to the resilience of the people of that small nation that was sacrificed in the tumultuous chess game of colonial superpowers dividing up Europe after the devastation of WWII. It is a textbook protocol on how to instill civil society from the ground up, so that democratic life can thrive. This is a story that has been told in small pieces over the years in essays, catalogues, lectures, and radio and television interviews but needed the deeper context of a fulllength book.

Barbara Benish is a California-born artist and writer inspired by the ocean environment, the Mexican deserts, and surrounding Indigenous cultures. At University of Hawai’i in the early 1980s, Benish’s work in art and ethnology grounded her understanding of the intrinsic connection of environmental protection with social justice, and the relationship of Colonialism, sovereignty and stewardship. The Czechoslovak Revolution in 1989, in which Benish was involved, gave her first-hand experience in social change ignited by the arts.

In 1992 she moved from L.A. to Prague as a Fulbright scholar after co-curating the first cross-cultural exchange between the U.S. and Czechoslovakia in decades. She founded ArtMill in 2004 in rural Bohemia, an international eco-art center. From 2010-2015, Benish served as Advisor for U.N.E.P. in Arts & Outreach and, since 2015, is a Fellow at the Social Practice Arts Research Center (U.C. Santa Cruz). Benish has co-authored two books on art and the environment (Routledge), dozens of essays on art, most recently finishing a visual collaboration with political philosophers Michael Shapiro and Sam Opondo (U. Manchester, 2024). Her mixed media art has been shown in hundreds of international exhibitions including museums such as P.S.1 (MoMA) in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Stadtgeschichtliche Museen in Nürnburg, Germany, and the National Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic, to list a few.