Our Fresh Start
We are launching our new web site today. It's a collective effort, with contributions from artists, musicians, activists and other social creatives.
After the 2016 election, I was feeling demoralized and ostracized and, well...crushingly depressed. My husband, Steve Leonard, and I cocooned for awhile, but then a young artist, Samantha Shackelford, came into our lives and together we started thinking through what we could do and contribute in this chaotic and confusing era. Then Tracy Ruggles and Lauren Firestein, aka local singer-songwriter duo, Something About Fireflies, joined us...and also crucially, Chance Claxton, Armineh Astanbous and Patryce Kinga Bąk. People kept coming around and collaborations and synthesis and some momentum started to happen...
What's developed organically over the past year is now represented on the new ModNomad Studio web site. We'll continue to add narrative, features and ways to build community, but this is our fresh start.
We are planting a flag for the common good and democracy's resilience here at ModNomad. We are now a creative studio and incubator offering lodging, gathering and collaborating opportunities.
Heal. Create. Relate. This is the place.
Our philosophy and practices are evolving as we collaborate with artists, craftsmen and other designers to save a long-neglected 1880's cottage in Sausalito, California. Our aesthetic is rooted in salvage design, in bringing beauty and purpose back to discarded materials. We seek to design inspiring and flexible -- or fluid -- spaces to foster unconventional thought, creativity and collaboration.
If developers had gotten hold of this land and view, this piece of Sausalito history would have been torn down and replaced by a far more expensive structure. The Bay Area housing market has priced out too many socially-minded creative people. We wanted to do something to address that.
So...ModNomad offers free and subsidized live/work space for those dedicated to the creation of social artistry and entrepreneurship, activism, independent journalism and social economics. We are also dedicated to building community and to divining new solutions to the complex set of challenges we face in this time of existential, constitutional and climate crisis.
With dwindling resources, climate change, racism, mass shootings and the worst income inequality since the Robber Baron days, our broken political system and polarized citizenry seem paralyzed. We need new thinking, more synthesis and clarity, and practical ideas and action to heal our governance and election systems. We look forward to collaborating with social creatives and anyone inspired by this kind of thinking.
Let's move beyond the false borders of our too-narrow political discourse and give space to expand the American imagination of what is possible.
Let's share this beautiful place and promote safe haven for creativity, inspiration and healing in our distracted and divided nation.