Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter ELIPHANTE – Michael Kahn’s Sculptural Village in the Arizona Desert Pipe Dreams is Mike’s most recent building, and it’s an art gallery of his paintings, a labyrinth of a building with dozens of rooms, tableaus, displays of paintings, fabrics, tilework, stonework, stained-glass-colored beams of light reflecting on walls and floors. Mike’s […]
The Psychedelic Art Project That Is Eliphante Village – The Huffington Post – 2016 It’s not often that you can visit a magical psychedelic world without taking drugs, but Eliphante Village offers just that. The strange art project began with a couple who were gifted three acres of land in Cornville, Arizona to do with […]
Saving Eliphante – The Outs for The Noise – 2010 Beginning around 1979, and continuing for the better part of three decades, Michael and Leda Kahn created a magical folk art installation along the sycamore and mesquite-lined banks of Oak Creek in Cornville, Arizona. The entire complex is known as “Eliphante”, named after the first […]
Found Objects Into Art – Strange Houses & Weird Homes In 1979, Michael Kahn and Leda Livant moved to a rural three-acre plot of land in Cornville, Arizona. Allowed to stay on the property rent-free, Kahn and Livant started building what would become Eliphante immediately, living in an 8′ x 10′ wooden shack that Michael […]
Wesley Treat’s Roadside Resort – Distinctive Digs Your initiation into this alternate world begins with a tunnel of driftwood arches, a delicate and twisted passage that guides you upward onto a meadow. Sculptures of flotsam, of tree limbs and discarded metal, line your path. You step inside a cave-like entryway made of stucco and chicken […]
Narrow Larry’s Selected Visionary Folk Art in the US Located south of Sedona, near the town of Cornville, Arizona, Eliphante is a mesmerizing sculptural and architectural environment created over the past 20 years by artists Mike Kahn and Leda Livant. Set on three acres adjacent to a creek bed, the composition consists of three main […]
Rubber Tramp Artist’s visit to Eliphante Upon arrival, I found the creek still flowing. I didn’t realize there were rocks arranged above the level of the water on which I could have walked across, so I just lifted my skirt and waded through. (I was glad I was wearing my sturdy, all-terrain Keen sandals). I […]
The Amazing Eliphante Located south of Sedona, near the town of Cornville, Arizona, Eliphante is a mesmerizing sculptural and architectural environment created over the past 30 years by artists Mike Kahn and Leda Livant. Set on three acres adjacent to a creek bed, the composition consists of three main structures: Eliphante, the original construction, with […]
Exploring Eliphante, A Hidden Arizona Art Haven Eliphante. Melodic to say — and hard to explain. The hand-built collection of buildings and sculptures began more than 30 years ago as a painter’s vision, tucked away off a residential street in the tiny town of Cornville. People say you can’t put it into words. You just […]
Eliphante: Michael Kahn’s Sculptural Village in the Arizona Desert Eliphante, Mike’s first major building, was constructed in three years. It was built out of “…adobe, wood, stone, ferro-cement and glass.” To enter, you wind through a sculptural painted tunnel into a room with stone floors, steps, terraces, and a multi-colored profusion of stained glass. The […]
Fragments and Dreams: The twisted journey to the heart of Verde Valley’s Eliphante The place is built of fragments. It is a mosaic. It is a dream that breaks up and re-emerges with vivid clarity. Pieces of wood twist and turn on themselves. They caress rocks in their folds. Passageways reveal windows of colored glass. […]
A Handmade Home ANY fool can hire an architect to draw up a plan for a house, but it takes a truly inspired fool — which is to say, an artist — to start building and see where the earth and driftwood and shards of broken pottery take him, and an equally impassioned fool — […]