José Argüelles (1939–2011)

José Argüelles, born Joseph Anthony Arguelles Rochester, Minnesota January 24, 1939 – March 23, 2011), was an American New Age author and artist. He was the founder of Planet Art Network and the Foundation for the Law of Time. He held a Ph.D. in Art History and Aesthetics from the University of Chicago and taught at numerous colleges, including Princeton University, the University of California, Davis, the San Francisco Art Institute, and Evergreen State College. As one of the originators of the Earth Day concept (due in part to the influence of astrologer Dane Rudhyar), Argüelles founded the first Whole Earth Festival in 1970, at Davis, California. He is best known for his leading role in organizing the 1987 Harmonic Convergence event, for inventing (with the assistance of his wife Lloydine) the perpetual Dreamspell calendar in 1992, and for the central role that he played in the emergence of the 2012 phenomenon. Towards the end of his life, Argüelles focused on issue of consciousness, elaborating the concept of a noosphere (based on the work of Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir Vernadsky) as a global work of art. Specifically, he envisioned a "rainbow bridge" encircling the Earth.