Alex Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors is not a gallery in any conventional sense. Located on 40 acres in Wappingers Falls, New York, CoSM is a living temple to visionary art — a place where the boundary between the sacred and the creative dissolves, where the act of making art is understood as a spiritual practice, and where the work on the walls is meant to transform the people who look at it.
Chris Dyer has been part of this world for two decades. Born in Lima, Peru, raised in Montreal, and now based wherever his art takes him, Dyer is one of the most distinctive voices in visionary art — a painter whose work blends Peruvian shamanic iconography, sacred geometry, street art aesthetics, and a color palette that seems to vibrate off the canvas. His murals appear on walls in cities around the world. His canvases sell for tens of thousands of dollars. And his workshops — which he has been teaching at CoSM and other venues for years — have changed the lives of hundreds of artists.
"Art is not a career," Dyer told FC Weekly during a recent visit to CoSM. "Art is a calling. And the calling is to wake people up — to show them that the world is more beautiful, more strange, and more sacred than they've been told." His workshops at CoSM blend practical instruction in painting technique with deeper explorations of consciousness, creativity, and the shamanic traditions that inform his work. Participants describe the experience as transformative in ways that go beyond art-making.
Grey's gallery provides the perfect context for Dyer's teachings. The CoSM collection — which includes Grey's own monumental paintings of the human energy body, as well as work by dozens of other visionary artists — creates an environment where the sacred and the creative are inseparable. "When you're surrounded by work that was made with that kind of intention," Dyer says, "it changes what you're capable of making."
The Chris Dyer Limited SnapBack — available now through FC Weekly's Drop of the Week — is a piece of wearable art that carries that same intention. Each hat features Dyer's signature cosmic iconography, hand-embroidered and limited to 200 units. It's the kind of object that Dyer makes when he's not painting murals or teaching workshops: something small enough to hold in your hands, but charged with the same energy as everything else he creates.
