(NEW LEBANON, N.Y.) – A community of visual and performance artists, as well as poets, philosophers, and thinkers of all kinds will gather for the Vanishing Art Festival at the Abode of the Message from Wednesday, August 24 to Sunday, August 28, 2011, to consider what life could look like if we return to the deepest, most spiritual dimensions of art as practice and experience. The festival is presented by Seven Pillars House of Wisdom.

Throughout the festival there will be performances, artist interviews and talks, meditations on art, social and music lounges, large group conversations and small group discussion salons. Each day will include a large-scale work of “vanishing art” – artworks that literally vanish after being created – one for each of the four alchemical elements: earth, air, fire and water, involving all participants in a significant symbolic and artistic act.

Unlike other festivals, the Vanishing Art Festival is intentionally being kept small, no more than 100 people in total, to allow deep connections between participants, between participants and art, and then ultimately between all that exists and the natural world.

Many celebrated artists will attend including Carolee Schneemann, the famous multidisciplinary artist who focuses on art as it relates to the body, sexuality and gender; Phong Bui, an installation artist and the influential editor of the Brooklyn Rail; Robert Kelly, the poet and professor at Bard College who has published over 50 books; Fred Johnson, an acclaimed jazz musician and performer; Syrian-born Bisan Toron, a vocal improviser; Dorothea Rockburne, an abstract painter inspired by mathematics and astronomy; Drew Dellinger, a poet who performs and speaks on themes of cosmology, ecology and compassion; and Wendy Tremayne, an activist and performance artist who offers remedies for materialism, with her interactive workshop Swap-O-Rama-Rama, functioning in more than 100 cities worldwide.

Other participants include David Levi Strauss, Raymond Foye, Sterrett Smith, Charles Stein, Robin Becker, Yuval Ron, Yakov Rabinovich, Meryl Gross, Charlotte Mandell, George Quasha, Susan Quasha and Pir Zia Inayat-Khan. Christopher Bamford, editor of Steiner Books, and Peter Lamborn Wilson, a writer and artist from the Hudson River Valley, will host.

The Vanishing Art Festival will be held at the Abode of the Message, a retreat center and community located on the outskirts of the Berkshire Mountains, in Columbia County, N.Y.

The festival is $310 for four days, including meals, for those under age 35 who opt to tent; up to $606 for those over age 35 requesting a single room. Day passes are also available for $35-$100 a day.

For additional details or to register visit Seven Pillars House of Wisdom, call 518.794.8777, or e-mail wisdom@sevenpillarshouse.org.

Seven Pillars House of Wisdom is a non-profit organization based in Columbia County, New York, with events held in New Lebanon as well as cities including San Francisco, Washington, D.C., New York City, Paris and London. In the tradition of the great wisdom schools of all time, Seven Pillars brings together leading thinkers – -scholars, spiritual leaders, visual and performing artists and others – to nurture a culture committed to the ideals of beauty, unity, depth and sacredness in everyday life.