Art Movements...

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For thousands of years, art was largely concerned with capturing the visible world and producing a convincing likeness. By the mid-1800s, photography could perform that function with extraordinary precision. The artist was suddenly free to do something more: interpret, transform, and explore reality rather than simply reproduce it.

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This freedom gave rise to the great modern art movements. Impressionism captured the artist’s impression rather than an exact replica of the subject.

 

Artists such as Van Gogh, Renoir, and Monet transformed how people experienced the visible world. Later, Picasso and others reduced recognizable subjects to abstract forms, while Surrealism pushed beyond physical reality into dreams, symbolism, and the imagination. Salvador Dalí became one of its defining figures.

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Then came Pop Art and Andy Warhol.

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Pop Art brought everyday culture into the gallery: Campbell’s soup cans, comic-book imagery, celebrities, and mass media. Warhol understood both popular culture and the power of art as communication. His Factory became a gathering place where art, music, performance, celebrity, and culture converged.

It was from this evolving landscape that another possibility emerged.

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The Omni Art Movement Began in 1981

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At his first studio in Denver, artist Jeffrey Milburn began exploring art through performance and installation. In 1984, he moved to New York City, where he continued developing a body of work that crossed the boundaries between visual art, performance, objects, movement, symbolism, and ideas.

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During this period, Milburn's work attracted the attention of Andy Warhol. Their conversations centered on the changing nature of contemporary art and the possibility of moving beyond the conventions established by earlier movements.

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Milburn began formalizing what he called Omni Art—an approach that did not attempt simply to represent an object or subject, but to juxtapose objects, characters, movement, symbolism, and multiple forms of expression to explore aspects of reality that cannot be directly seen or easily explained.

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Omni Art was conceived not simply as another style, but as an evolution of artistic expression.

The name "Omni" reflects an appreciation of the whole: the visible and invisible, the physical and metaphysical, the artistic and intellectual. Painting, sculpture, assemblage, performance, music, literature, movement, science, philosophy, and spirituality could all become part of the same creative language.

 

Exploring the Invisible

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At the heart of Omni Art is a fundamental question:

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What if the world we see is only a small part of reality?

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Milburn was deeply influenced by Buckminster Fuller's observation that much of reality remains invisible to human perception.

 

Rather than treating the unseen as something outside the territory of art, Milburn made it his subject.

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Omni Art therefore seeks to explore consciousness, energy, spirituality, intuition, unseen dimensions, and the deeper structures of the cosmos.

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This distinguishes Omni Art from movements such as Pop Art, which transformed familiar popular imagery, or Postmodernism, which questioned systems of meaning and representation.

 

Omni Art looks simultaneously inward toward consciousness and outward toward the structure of the universe.

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Its purpose is not merely to represent reality, but to investigate it.

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The Five Dimensions

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Central to Milburn's philosophy is a model of five interconnected dimensions of experience.

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The Physical Dimension is the tangible world of matter and ordinary sensory perception.

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The Astral Dimension encompasses dreams, emotions, intuition, and experiences beyond ordinary physical perception.

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The Causal Dimension relates to deeper relationships of cause and effect and to the Vedic concept of Akasha—the realm of potential and interconnected events.

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The Mental Dimension is the world of thought, imagination, ideas, and understanding.

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The Etheric Dimension represents the most subtle level: higher awareness, spiritual insight, and transformative consciousness.

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These dimensions are not presented as separate worlds, but as an interconnected continuum. Together they suggest that human experience may extend beyond what the five senses ordinarily reveal.

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Sacred Geometry and the Universalist Group

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One of the visual languages through which Omni Art explores these ideas is sacred geometry. Milburn's use of geometric forms, including the Platonic solids, connects mathematics, natural structure, philosophy, and spiritual symbolism.

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This philosophy came together in the Universalist Group, a collection of twelve assemblage works created between 1981 and 1991. Combining found objects, mixed media, crystals, sacred geometry, and symbolic forms, the works were designed to function as visual investigations into the structure of existence.

The collection culminated in a one-man museum exhibition at the Islip Art Museum in New York in 1991.

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Among the significant works is SOUL (1981), which incorporates Platonic solids and quartz crystals in an exploration of Milburn's five-dimensional model. Its imagery invokes the black hole as a symbol of the boundary between the known and unknown—the visible and invisible—and the possibility that what appears to be an ending may actually be an entrance into another order of reality.

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Warhol, New York, and the Birth of a Movement

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Milburn continued creating and staging Omni Art performance installations in New York through the 1980s and early 1990s. His work entered the orbit of the city's art and cultural scene, including encounters with Andy Warhol and other influential artists and cultural figures.

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Following Warhol's death in 1987, the Omni Art Movement was formally published in The Village Voice in 1988. Milburn continued developing the movement and its performance installations until his 1991 museum exhibition.

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The loss of Warhol and, later, Keith Haring profoundly affected Milburn and prompted a period of reflection. He eventually left New York and traveled across the country before establishing a new studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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There, he continued creating and refining the concepts behind Omni Art.

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From Human Evolution to Meta-Evolution

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Over time, Omni Art developed into a broader inquiry into human meta-evolution ( a term Milburn coined in his 2007 book Omni Art - Language of Consciousness)  Meta-Evolution encompassed the possibility that human evolution is not limited to biological development, but can also occur through the evolution of consciousness.

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The movement explores humanity's relationship with spirituality, science, consciousness, intuition, and phenomena that challenge conventional ideas about reality.

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Whether approached as metaphysics, philosophy, art, or an invitation to question accepted assumptions, Omni Art asks a fundamental contemporary question:

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What is humanity becoming?

 

The Omni Art Salon

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In 2005, Milburn took Omni Art onto the internet, creating the Omni Art Salon as a digital gathering place for artists, scientists, philosophers, spiritual thinkers, and cultural innovators.

 

Following the model of a traditional art salon, The Omni Art Salon used conversation itself as a creative medium. Ideas, questions, interviews, and exchanges became extensions of the artwork, connecting people across disciplines and around the world.

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The transition from gallery to internet was a natural evolution of Omni Art. If art can connect people, ideas, disciplines, and dimensions of experience, then conversation can itself become part of the creative process.

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Milburn later documented three decades of his work and observations in his 2007 book, Omni Art: Language of Consciousness.

 

A Language for Consciousness

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Ultimately, Omni Art seeks to create a language for experiences that conventional language cannot always express.

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A geometric form, a crystal, an assemblage, a sound, a performance, or an unexpected juxtaposition can communicate through intuition and association rather than explanation.

 

The viewer is not simply asked to look at an artwork, but to participate in the question it represents.

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For Jeffrey Milburn, art can become a bridge between matter and consciousness, science and spirituality, the visible and invisible, the individual and the cosmos.

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The Omni Art Movement is therefore more than a collection of artworks or a particular artistic style. It is an ongoing exploration of reality and human awareness.

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It asks us to look beyond what is immediately visible—to consider what we sense, imagine, intuit, and cannot yet explain.

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Perhaps the greatest work of art is reality itself—and our evolving ability to perceive it.