Exhibition Celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the Summer of Love by Showcasing Radical Art, Architecture, and Design of the Counterculture

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) will launch the region-wide celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love with HIPPIE MODERNISM: THE STRUGGLE FOR UTOPIA. This major exhibition examines the intersection of the radical art, architecture, and design of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s and the resonance of these innovations today. A traveling exhibition organized by the Walker Art Center and assembled with the assistance of BAMPFA, Hippie Modernism will be on view in Berkeley from February 8 through May 21, 2017. The exhibition will coincide with the first anniversary of BAMPFA's new Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed building in downtown Berkeley.

Hippie Modernism charts the evolution of one of the most fertile periods of recent cultural history (c. 1964-74) with experimental furniture, alternative living structures, immersive environments, media installations, alternative magazines, experimental books, printed ephemera, and films. These works convey the social, cultural, and political ferment of the 1960s and 1970s, when radical experiments challenged convention, overturned traditional hierarchies, and advanced new communal ways of living and working. Hippie Modernism also demonstrates how the counterculture, once dismissed as a social and aesthetic anomaly, introduced ideas and techniques that have profoundly shaped contemporary life, including ecological awareness, social justice, and open communication. From yoga and organic foods to the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements, the counterculture's legacy remains as strong as ever.

The curators of the Berkeley presentation, BAMPFA Director Lawrence Rinder and UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Architecture Greg Castillo, have expanded the scope of the exhibition to highlight the key role the Bay Area-and especially Berkeley-played in the counterculture movement. Many artists, architects, and designers in this period were searching for a new kind of utopia as an implicit critique of society; however, in the Bay Area, many hoped to go beyond mere critique to create actual change-technological, political, and ecological-on the streets, in the classroom, and in government policy. "Hippies were modern not because they believed that the world could be different than it was," says Rinder, "but because they made that difference real."

Archival materials from Bay Area protest movements and collectives-ranging from the Indians of All Tribes' nineteenth-month-long occupation of Alcatraz (1969-71) to the radical performances of the Cockettes and the Angels of Light-represent the transformative activism of the period. Works by local artists and designers, including Frances Butler, J. B. Blunk, Sonya Rapoport, and Bonnie Ora Sherk, showcase the synthesis of High Modernism with counterculture style and themes, while images of the Emeryville mudflats anonymous sculpture park point to a radically individualist approach. Bay Area counterculture architecture is represented in the BAMPFA exhibition through documentation of the handbuilt houses in the towns of Canyon and Sausalito. Also new to the Berkeley display are posters from the Chicago Women's Graphics Collective; the 1970 Gay-In in Griffith Park; and Gary D. Anderson's original design for the now ubiquitous Recycle Symbol from 1970.

The Berkeley presentation will also include an in-depth, ten-week companion film series organized by Associate Film Curator Kate MacKay. The series includes documentaries, experimental works, and feature films that explore the progressive social, political, and aesthetic concerns of the era. Highlights include BAMPFA's newly completed restoration of Steven Arnold's Luminous Procuress; Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool; Peter Watkins's Punishment Park; and Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. The series also includes a program of films from the Bay Area's famed Canyon Cinema, which was founded as an artist co-op in the 1960s.

Central to the exhibition are works that attempt to expand individual consciousness through altered states of perception. Among these are the meditative films of Jordan Belson; the transcendental paintings of the USCO collective; Bruce Conner's proto-music video, Breakaway; and conceptual work of radical architects and design groups such as Haus-Rucker-Co and Archigram.

A wide variety of images, books, magazines, posters, and prints reflect emerging social awareness and collective consciousness. Democratic modes of cultural production intended to forge networks of like-minded individuals, these works include Ken Isaac's pioneering The Knowledge Box (1962/2009), a room-size chamber that immerses viewers in a montage of projected images culled from popular press; the posters designed by Emory Douglas for the Black Panthers newspaper; the silkscreened antiwar prints of Sister Corita Kent; and posters from the Berkeley People's Park movement.

Other works address the rejection of conventional social structures and the dissolution of boundaries between art and life, culture and politics: Evelyn Roth's living structures made from recycled sweaters; a re-creation of a dome by the Drop City collective, which housed their Ultimate Painting of 1968; and the performance activism of the Diggers, the Cockettes, and the Angels of Light.

Among other rarely seen highlights are the psychedelic paintings of Judith Williams and Isaac Abrams; documentation of utopian concepts and experiments such as Instant City in Spain, Superstudio in Italy, the Provo movement in Holland, and Ant Farm's Truck Stop Network; experimental publications such as Scanlan's, ONYX, and Free City News; and pioneering films, videos, and multimedia works by Bruce Conner, Jordan Belson, and the Boyle Family.

Support
Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia is organized by the Walker Art Center and assembled with the assistance of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), and was curated by Andrew Blauvelt, Director of Cranbrook Art Museum. The BAMPFA presentation is organized by Director Lawrence Rinder and guest curator Greg Castillo, Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.

The exhibition is made possible with support from the Martin and Brown Foundation, the Prospect Creek Foundation, Annette and John Whaley, and Audrey and Zygi Wilf. Support for the exhibition catalog is provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of Walker Art Center publications. The BAMPFA presentation is made possible with generous support from Coleman Fung, Frances Hellman and Warren Breslau, Nion McEvoy and Leslie Berriman, Carla and David Crane, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, and Beth Rudin DeWoody.

Catalog
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalog published by the Walker Art Center that includes new scholarly writings and interviews with major counterculture figures. Edited by Andrew Blauvelt, with essays by Blauvelt, Greg Castillo, Esther Choi, Alison Clarke, Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro, Ross Elfline, Craig Peariso, Tina Rivers Ryan, Catharine Rossi, Simon Sadler, Felicity Scott, and Lorraine Wild and David Karwan. Interviews with Gerd Stern and Michael Callahan of USCO, Günter Zamp Kelp of Haus-Rucker-Co, Ken Isaacs, Ron Williams and Woody Rainey of ONYX, Franco Raggi of Global Tools, Tony Martin, and Clark Richert and Richard Kallweit of Drop City.

Selected Public Programs

A Conversation with Michael Pollan & Simon Sadler
Venue and date TBD

Michael Pollan, bestselling author and professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, joins UC Davis Design Studies Professor Simon Sadler to discuss hippie holism, LSD, and promising new uses of psychedelic drugs now emerging from psychotherapeutic research.

Hippie Modernism Forums
A series of roundtable discussions will take place at BAMPFA on Saturday afternoons. Included with admission.

Counterculture / Cyberculture
Saturday, February 11, 1-3 p.m.

Speakers include: Lee Felsenstein, a digital pioneer and a fellow at the Computer History Museum of Palo Alto; Fred Turner, the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Stanford University; Lynn Hershman Leeson, artist and filmmaker; and Greg Niemeyer, UC Berkeley associate professor of art practice and founder of the Stanford University Digital Art Center.

Liberated Territories
Saturday March 11, 1-3 p.m.

Speakers include: Lisa Uddin, assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Visual Culture Studies at Whitman College; Anthony Raynsford, assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at San Jose State University; Suzanne Lacy, a visual artist; and Sean Burns, director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarships at UC Berkeley.

Fluid Identities
Saturday, April 15, 1-3 p.m.

Speakers include: Fayette Hauser, a founding member of the avant-garde psychedelic theater company The Cockettes; Lauren Onkey, dean for humanities at Cuyahoga Community College; Brontez Purnell, a writer, dancer, and musician living in Oakland, California; and Juana María Rodríguez, a UC Berkeley professor in the Gender and Women's Studies Department and in the Performance Studies Graduate Group.

Creative Communes
Saturday, May 13, 1-3 p.m.

Speakers include: Ramón Sender Barayón, cofounder of the San Francisco Tape Music Center and resident of the Diggers' Morning star Ranch Commune; Erin Elder, independent curator and creator of PLAND (Practice Liberating Art through Necessary Dislocation), an experimental off-the-grid artists' residency in New Mexico; Fritz Haeg, an artist, educator, and founder of a new commune-sanctuary-school hybrid at Salmon Creek Farm in Northern California; and Greg Castillo, a UC Berkeley professor and guest curator of Hippie Modernism.

Guided Tours
Specially trained UC Berkeley graduate students from diverse disciplines lead guided exhibition tours on Wednesdays and Sundays.

Need more San Francisco / Bay Area Theatre News in your life? Sign up for all the news on the Winter season, discounts & more...