Urban communes aren’t just for punks and poets anymore. Zionist youth in Brooklyn are moving in together and starting urban kibbutzim, the Jewish student magazine New Voices reports. The urban kibbutz movement is an Israeli import that grew out of twentieth-century agricultural collectives based on ideas of social activism. The article is vague about what activism in Brooklyn entails, mentioning only work in the Zionist youth movements.

Kibbutz members build community through practices such as sharing a checking account and weekly six-hour meetings. This closeness must take a toll on members, but they’re motivated by their convictions. Kibbutz member Daniel Roth says, “We are all interested in working to break down the walls that the capitalist world builds between each of us.”

—Lisa Gulya

The 1960s smashed the cliché of the isolated and introverted artist. Drugs, experimentation, and the search for freedom led troves of hippy artists out of urban scenes and into rural art communes. Artist Michael Fallon’s blog The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America tells the story of one such artist, Dean Fleming. After playing a pivotal role in sparking Manhattan’s SoHo art scene, the painter turned his back on New York to make a life for himself in Colorado. Fleming found inspiration in the area’s Native American culture and mountainous scenery on a visit to Drop City, the United States’ first rural hippy commune. The unsustainable chaos he observed there led him to found a commune of his own, the Libre Community, in 1968. Fleming hoped Libre would allow artists of all kinds to escape the city and recharge. It must have worked, because the commune still exists today.

(Thanks, GalleryDriver.)

—Erik Helin