{01} mission
Sundown Schoolhouse is a geodesic home based educational environment for gently radical design, literary, performing & visual arts. It is founded on the premise that as artists, designers, performers and writers, we should be powerful and active agents in society. We want to confront the truth of our time and place. We want a rich complex dialog that extends out to the world around us.
We may be irritants, activists, problem solvers, catalysts, poets, or simply witnesses. We want to look head-on as our natural and urban environments gradually deteriorate around us. We want to invert the power structure as design and the arts are co-opted as tools for marketing. We want an alternative to the model of the architect, artist, designer, performer or writer as the passive professional who waits to be told how, when and where their work may engage in a public dialog. We want to reclaim the promise of art as the ultimate form of human freedom and expression in a society where it has become either trivialized as entertainment, hijacked as pure commodity, under-valued or even feared.
To live in the 21st century city increasingly means a strange paradoxical life of being both virtually connected {by the web, mobile phones, email, TV, movies, magazines} and physically isolated {in the car, house, office or mall} despite living in close proximity. This lack of meaningful physical connectedness both with other people and with the natural environment prevents the urban inhabitant from understanding the complex interdependence and interconnectivity of people to each other and to their environment. The Schoolhouse will foster an approach to the arts that is outwardly focused, engaged with the people around us and responsive to the place that we are in.