West of Center:

Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977

In the heady and hallucinogenic days of the 1960s and ’70s, a diverse range of artists and creative individuals based in the American West—from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest—broke the barriers between art and lifestyle and embraced the new, hybrid sensibilities of the countercultural movement. West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977 illuminated the unique works of these individuals through videos, photographs, drawings, ephemera, and other original and re-created objects and environments.

The countercultural movement has typically been associated with psychedelic art, but West of Center presented psychedelia as only one dimension of the larger, artistically oriented, socially based phenomenon. The wider integration of art practices, political action, and collaborative life activities is foundational for so much contemporary art and culture.

Co-curators Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner brought together a range of projects by groups and individuals such as the Drop City commune in southern Colorado, light show producers Single Wing Turquoise Bird, San Francisco’s extravagant theatre groups the Cockettes and the Angels of Light, modern dancer Anna Halprin, former Black Panther party member Emory Douglas, the Ant Farm collective, and the lesbian-feminist intentional communities of southern Oregon. The exhibition also featured a re-creation of the legendary Ultimate Painting (1966), a spinning circular canvas made for Drop City’s Theatre Dome. Lost after its exhibition in Experiments in Art and Technology at the Brooklyn Museum in 1969, this work has been recreated in 2011 by Clark Richert, one of its original makers.