2025 Microcosmos Convening
Bath, Maine 19-21 October 2025
The MicroCosmos project makes space to hold and amplify the micro by convening artists to reflect, study, and then encounter fellow practitioners they’ve never met.
In October 2025, Co-Champions Javiera Benavente, Nick Slie, and Matthew Glassman curated and gathered a group of artists at Chocolate Church Arts Center in Bath, Maine for a weekend of sharing artistic practice as part of HowlRound's MicroCosmos initiative. The MicroCosmos convening drew on a decade-plus long relationship of collaboration around arts, culture, and commoning to create a think tank for ensemble and place-based artistic practices that advance sustainability in our field.
The artists, half from Maine and half from elsewhere in the United States, were each asked to present a ten-minute introduction to their practice. Participants shared how they're using their art to address place, community, and personhood in a chaotic chapter of American history. These introductions were interspersed with sharings of practice, which included everything from group-made puppetry to meditation sessions to classic theatre games.
Participants also made a trip to Popham Beach State Park, led a session with students at the Seguinland Institute, engaged in the act of creation in Chocolate Church's Art Lab, and shared many, many oysters.
Learn more about the 2025 convening:
Participants in the MicroCosmos convening. Photos by Jeff Cutler.
About the Microcosmos Project
The MicroCosmos project makes space to hold and amplify the micro by convening artists to reflect, study, and then encounter fellow practitioners they’ve never met. The spark for this project came from the first Art and Survival convening in 2014, initiated by Matthew Glassman, then Co-Artistic Director of Double Edge Theatre. Art and Survival aimed to foster collective thinking among artists, theorists, and activists across disciplines. The success of the inaugural event led Glassman, Javiera Benavente, and Nick Slie to develop subsequent convenings over ten years, creating a network of over eighty artists, practitioners, activists, funders, and thought leaders. Throughout this decade, HowlRound served as a key thought partner to and documentor of Art and Survival.
During this time, HowlRound engaged an Arts, Culture, and Commoning working group, which met virtually and gathered in person in Boston, Massachusetts 2018 and for a retreat in Millerton, New York in January 2020. Read about the Arts, Culture, and Commoning working group here.
Out of all of these conversations, MicroCosmos has emerged. The first output of the project was a series in the HowlRound Journal. This series brought artists together to engage with creative prompts curated by Javiera, Matthew, and Nick, and then encounter a fellow practitioner they’d never met. These encounters took the form of virtual conversations which were then transcribed and published.
The creative prompts were:
- What questions and callings are you living?
- What are the places, spaces, and relationships that are undergirding you and your work?
- What seeds are you planting and tending?
- What are the practices that would help you?
- What are the experiments you yearn to conduct?
Just coming back to these really micro practices of being present with life and death, the land and all of my relations, and being with the questions—What is being asked of me at this moment? What do I have to offer?
—Javiera Benavente, "Artists Unfolding New Futures in Tiny and Hidden Realms"