Resistance and Regeneration: ArtMill in the Czech Republic
Two hours away from the hustle and bustle of Prague, there lies a quaint village called Horažďovice, and just a short drive away, there lies an even quainter farm, where its inhabitants grow much more than crops. On the spot of land that once housed the local flour mill, where centuries of villagers used to gather to process their grain, something else is now thriving – art.
This place is called ArtMill, center for regenerative arts, where a community of artists, farmers, and activists work together with the local ecosystem. The old miller’s house is home to a queer-led team of creatives, who keep their door open for all, and the historic flour mill’s aged frame is now adorned with vibrant art pieces from exhibitions past. In the meadows surrounding you’ll find eclectic lodgings where resident artists stay each summer, among the flocks of chickens and a pair of horses grazing. Food is grown sustainably for the community in flourishing greenhouses and permaculture gardens that regenerate themselves each year. For many, it is a sanctuary like no other.
But the peace you’ll find at ArtMill today was not always the case. In fact, the mill and its past owners have a long – and sometimes dark – history.
An Exhibition of Dissent
ArtMill’s story begins with an American woman named Barbara Benish, an artist living in Los Angeles in the late 1970s. Benish was – as many spirited young people do – backpacking through Europe with a group of friends. Curious about her distant Czech heritage, she decided to cross the “Iron Curtain” into Czechoslovakia, not knowing it would one day be the country she calls home.
“I was swept away with Europe’s beauty for the first time, and when we stepped off the train in Prague, time disappeared,” Benish describes in her upcoming book, ArtMill: A Story of Sustainable Creativity in Bohemia. “Here the buildings were gray, the streets empty. The melancholy was palpable.”
Over the next decade, she made many more trips to Czechoslovakia, feeling a call to return, and eventually acquiring a close network of friends and fellow creatives. She recalls feeling inspired by those making art in a non-market-based economy, vastly different from the world she knew in Los Angeles.
The Prague art scene, despite being small and unknown to most of the world, was kept alive in underground communities working to create while constantly avoiding arrests and surveillance from the regime.
“Each artist formed a way to live in protest against the regime, dissent that became stronger and more vocal with each month as the decade came to a close,” Benish writes.
Benish had an idea to create a collaboration between the loud and open LA art scene and this secret underworld of Czechoslovak artistry she had discovered. She envisioned an art exhibition, but more importantly, a political statement, something which would bridge the West and the East in the midst of the Cold War.
“I really wanted it to be an exchange, in Prague one year, and in LA the next year,” Benish recalled. “You have to imagine the context. Then, half of the Czechoslovak artists didn’t have passports. The borders were closed, you weren’t allowed to travel. They laughed like I was insane.”
The exchange took years of planning for Benish and her collaborators, getting the funds together from their own pockets and constantly escaping persecution from the secret police. Despite the many challenges, the artists stayed committed and the project Dialog: Praha/Los Angeles was launched.
In the summer of 1989, twenty-seven artists, both Czechoslovak and American, exhibited their art across three different galleries in Prague, attracting over five thousand people from all over the country.
“It wasn't so much about the sculptures or paintings we were showing. It was about the action that we did together, the resistance against a regime that was forbidding freedom of expression,” Benish said.
Only a couple of months later, the Velvet Revolution would happen in Czechoslovakia, ending four decades of communist rule. With the borders now open, the Czechoslovak artists were able to travel to Los Angeles for the second half of the exhibition in the summer of 1990.
“The context of the political struggle of the artists was honored and revered,” Benish writes. “The Czechoslovak artists were stars in a constellation of West Coast culture that was itself long immersed in a tradition of counterculture.”
The exhibition ended in success, and while the artists returned home to Czechoslovakia, Benish realized it was her home now as well. She left everything behind – selling her Nikon camera to afford the trip – and got on a plane in 1992. She arrived in a Prague she had never known before, untethered from the shackles of totalitarianism and with the former dissident Václav Havel as president.
From Flour to Fine Arts
More than ten years later, Benish was a mother and the founder of the non-profit organization ArtDialog, continuing to work as an artist in an ever-evolving Prague. With prices on the rise and studio space limited, she and her partner decided to move the family to the Czech countryside.
“I say I had two immigrations. One was to Czechoslovakia, but the second one was to Šumava – probably more drastic, coming from LA,” Benish said.
They purchased the Červený Mlýn (Red Mill), a 500-year-old flour mill in the rural Šumava, or Bohemian Forest, in southwest Czech Republic. Benish’s partner and father of their children, Czech architect Petr Kalný, carefully designed the restoration of the mill and its surrounding properties.
“It would have been more cost-effective to tear the mill ruins down and rebuild from the ground up.” Benish writes. “But our vision was to preserve the integrity of the original industrial period.”
Through their restoration, they discovered the long and dark history of the mill they now owned, and the story of its previous owners, the Navrátil family.
Under Nazi rule during World War II, Mr. Navrátil would illegally mill at night to feed Czechs in the village: a sacrifice that would land him in a concentration camp. He survived, only to be faced with the communist regime that came into power after the war. The authorities attempted to take his land and turn the mill into a state-run enterprise. The mill was kept running during these difficult times by his wife, Mrs. Navrátilová.
It seemed the theme of resistance followed Benish wherever she went. But among the renovations and revelations and adjustments to country-life, something else was emerging at the mill. An artist sanctuary was growing, cultivated by Benish, her family, and their many guests.
“It happened slowly, kind of without a plan, and then just mushroomed into this environmental art center,” Benish said.
From hosting summer camps for her two daughters, to housing foreign guests from around the world, to teaching English to the local villagers, a community began to form – what would be the beginnings of ArtMill.
Soon, they began to collaborate with universities like New York University and The Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), creating exchanges for international students to come and stay at the mill. Benish combined her knowledge from running Dialog: Praha/Los Angeles and working as an advisor for the United Nations Campaign for Responsibility on Hazardous Chemicals and Wastes to create a crossroads between activism, art, and sustainability.
“It’s what the Czech and Slovak and Moravian artists taught me – how you can create change through the arts. That was the main inspiration, and basis for ArtMill since the beginning. To teach how important civil society is for the maintenance of democracy,” Benish said.
Turning the Wheel
ArtMill over the years became a successful non-profit organization, and continues to host artist residencies, internships, study abroad programs, and more to this day. In 2022, Barbara Benish retired and passed down the directorship of ArtMill to her daughter, Gabriela Benish-Kalná, who has taken the mill’s core ideas in a new direction.
Benish-Kalná grew up on the mill and was surrounded by artists her whole life. She studied photography at FAMU and spent time as an activist at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, participating in the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, which fought for clean water access for indigenous communities in America.
Similar to her mother, she has taken her life experience and implemented it into ArtMill’s philosophy. Most notably, she has created a fundamental shift on the farm from environmental sustainability to regenerative practices.
“The systems we are living in cannot be sustained. It's not enough anymore, we need to regenerate, not only the environment, but the cultural and social discourse that we're living in,” Benish-Kalná said. “Regenerating the environment in turn regenerates and heals us. It's a reciprocal exchange.”
Benish-Kalná’s regenerative practices include permaculture gardening, which is self-sustaining agriculture, and pastoralism, or herding animals free range, to create an intersection of humans, animals, and plants that coexist together and actively benefit the local environment.
“It’s very different from living in a city – time slows down here. You have to feel the land, feel the seasons change. You have to listen and observe the plants and the whole ecosystem,” she said.
Along with implementing new farming practices, Benish-Kalná has moved ArtMill’s focus to creating safe and healing spaces for marginalized communities, namely refugees and the LGBTQ+ community.
“I've moved more towards creating these alternative models of coexistence, and I do think it's a form of resistance,” she said. “What I learned in these activist, grassroots movements, I am trying to translate that into practice here – how we can become, not just allies, but accomplices, and contribute to a better future.”
But Benish-Kalná does not shy away from the challenges that come with living in a community like this, especially in the context of rural Czech Republic, a traditionally conservative place. From ostracization, to village gossip, to sexist remarks, she tries to navigate the tumultuous territory with an open mind.
“I’m trying as much as I can to be in touch with my neighbors. Just buying greens from them or bringing them carp when the fishermen harvest the lake, or even stopping by to say hello is really important. Sometimes doing manual labor and farm work as a woman is pitied or judged. But I think the longer you keep doing it, the more accepted it's going to become,” she said.
“When people meet the diverse community that lives here, sometimes it's the first time they've come into contact with this otherness. And I think that it's important to have not just this cultural exchange, but to have the exchange of otherness – other backgrounds, sexual orientations, races, ethnicities, religious backgrounds. And it's really only when that contact happens that something can start changing,” she said.
What she found that bridges this gap between her conservative neighbors and intersectional community is, coincidentally, the very concept that ArtMill was built on – the power of art.
“Art is this language that can transcend borders and generations and cultures. When locals look at a piece of art, rather than arguing about whether or not refugees should get asylum in our country, it can bring closer the emotions that come with that, and really bring it home,” she said.
It is this idea that Benish-Kalná shares intrinsically with her mother, who, decades before, used art to bridge the gap between the two sides in the Cold War.
ArtMill exists today as a physical echo of this movement and proof of the vital connection between art and activism. From an exhibition opposing a totalitarian regime, to a farm combating climate change, to women defying traditional standards, resistance has had many different motives, but nevertheless, has remained a constant in the lives of those at ArtMill.
