The Golden Dome School will take residence at Krowswork with artwork, performances, meditations, and free tarot healing sessions for Oakland's First Friday on August 1st, 2014.

The individual work of Golden Dome collaborators Eliza Swann and Laura Zuspan will also be on view. More on their collaboration here.

The Golden Dome (golden-dome.org) is a nomadic school dedicated to investigating intentional living and art making as it relates to cultivating ideas for sustaining and optimizing life on Earth. Each school session takes a figure from the Major Arcana as its central theme, and focuses on the study of the spiritual dimensions within the natural sciences and the expansion of these insights into physical art practice. 

Our first program, "Performing the Fool's Planetary Rites", takes place at a sustainable land art project in West Marin County and centers around the study of the Tarot and it's relationship to performance. Eliza Swann, founder of the Golden Dome School, partnered with collaborator Laura Zuspan to bring the first iteration of The Golden Dome to life. 

List of participants

Sarah Bisceglie
Ayden Bremner
Mackenzie Budd
Molly Burkett
Jovencio de la Paz
Anais Delsol
Alexander Friend
Kat Hunt
Ryan Ingersol
Robai Janca
Gracelee Lawrence
Machine
Samantha Rehark
Stacy Jo Scott
Eliza Swann
Monica Uszerowicz
Laura Zuspan

About the Summer Program

The first incarnation of The Golden Dome School will have a performance based emphasis and will seek to explore the limits and boundaries for both an ontology of performance and the conceptualization of its relationship to environment. Through ritual, consecration, meditation, and movement exercises we will learn to perform the Fool’s Journey as described in the Tarot.

How does art embody questioning? In what ways does the tarot bridge the gap between healing, art, and performance? How can our art contribute to cultural and psychic hygiene for the benefit of our planet? How can environment be investigated through the practice of art making in such a way that these questions cannot only be asked, but be lived as well?

In traversing boundaries of representation, embodiment, sustainability, and consciousness the first Dome gathering seeks to provide its community with expansive methodologies for reconciling our selves and
our work to each other and to our world.

Why is it called The Golden Dome?
Because the raven said so.

The Story of The Golden Dome

In November of 2013, Eliza Swann performed a Shamanic ceremony on the Full Frost Moon in the mountains of Colorado. During the course of the ceremony, a raven spirit visited her and asked her to jot down notes for an experimental school that was to found itself in the Redwood Forests outside of San Francisco. The school would concern itself with art making as a form of psychic healing. The raven instructed her to begin a journey in Santa Fe, and to continue West in search of land and collaborators. Eliza called up her old friend Laura Zuspan to join her in setting up the first incarnation of the experimental school. In January of 2014, Eliza and her friend Ryan followed the raven’s instructions and set out across the desert from Santa Fe to Los Angeles – ravens swarmed their car for the duration of the journey. Just outside of Sedona, Arizona Eliza received a text from her friend Tyler who knew nothing of her raven visitation. It read: “Have you thought about starting your school at Raven’s Crossing? It’s in the Redwoods in Marin.” And so began the wonderful experiment that is the Golden Dome nomadic school.