The Dome Show

Founded in 1976 by sculptor Peter Voulkos, The Dome Center for Art, Music, and Dance in Oakland, California, was a pioneering live-work community that has provided creative soil for generations of Bay Area artists. Once a dome-shaped food processing factory, Voulkos and his collaborators transformed the industrial architecture into a radical, communal site where boundaries between art, life, and labor dissolved. Within its curved walls, artists, musicians, and dancers have for nearly five decades engaged in a continuous act of making and remaking the space—both literally and conceptually. At its core, The Dome embodies Voulkos' sculptural ethos: a belief in process over polish, in the expressive tension between destruction and creation. His monumental ceramic and bronze works—raw, fractured, and alive with gesture—set the tone. His early collaborators, including Clay Jensen, Bella Feldman, Marilyn Levine, and Ann Adair Voulkos, built not only studios but shared infrastructure: kilns, casting spaces, performance areas, and—most importantly—a communal culture sustained by experimentation.