Members of the Ganas Community in conversation with artist Francis Cape.

The eighty adults and children in the Ganas Community live together in eight houses on Staten Island. Founded by six core members in 1979, their varying degrees of commitment to communality and their adaptability to changing circumstances has enabled Ganas to grow and thrive over forty decades. Their stated purpose is to “bring reason and emotion together in daily problem solving, in order to create our world, with love, the way we want it to be”. The how and why of communal living will be the focus of the conversation in which all are invited to participate.

The conversation will be held seated on Francis Cape’s Utopian Benches, a gathering of benches from communal societies in the eastern United States, that now includes a bench from the Ganas Community.

Photo courtesy of Murray Guy