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FIFTY YEARS AFTER San Francisco’s Summer
of Love in the Haight-Ashbury district became
a symbol for the burgeoning hippie movement,
several museums will highlight counterculture
design and its modern-day impact.
Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia,
organized by the Walker Art Center and curated
by Andrew Blauvelt, director of Cranbrook Art
Museum, with the assistance of the University of
California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film
Archive, will be the first such exhibition to open
in the Bay Area, February 8–May 21 at BAMPFA.
The museum’s director, Lawrence Rinder,
and UC Berkeley associate professor of architecture Greg Castillo have added works by Bay
Area artists such as sculptor/builder J. B. Blunk
and designer Frances Butler, as well as vintage
ephemera, photographs and films, to highlight
the transformation launched by 100,000 young
antiwar rebels who gathered for a human be-in
at Golden Gate Park and changed the course of
the ’60s and ’70s.
“Hippie Modernism is the deliberate collision
of two terms that provoke a conceptual conflict,”
Castillo explains. It recasts much-maligned
“smelly” hippies as having the disruptive qualities that modern technology firms cherish. “The
term hippie was a media invention that typically
defined the counterculture by its lowest common
denominator. We often remember sex, drugs and
rock ’n’ roll, but not the aesthetic experimentation that went with them,” Castillo says.
But the alternative communities in cities like
San Francisco and in rural Sonoma and Humboldt counties, where land was cheap, became in
essence startup enterprises — generating funds
for a community short on cash yet rich in skills
and innovation. Counterculture members were
the first to raise consciousness about sustainable
living, regenerative design that mimics nature,
social justice and the virtues of shared economies,
concepts that have now become mainstream.
In Berkeley, for instance, hippies invented
methods of linking industrial waste to consumer
practice and began recycling. They introduced a
DIY building movement, in which artists such
as Butler printed fabrics and made clothes she
described as “reading environments.” In the San
Francisco psychedelic free theater group Angels of
Light, bearded gay men in drag viewed their bod-
ies as laboratories of cultural evolution. Such new
zones of enterprise, which architect Buckminster
Fuller might have called “liberated territories,”
Castillo says, also included, in Santa Cruz, organic
farming, which has mushroomed into a more than
$43 billion industry nationwide.
The exhibition juxtaposes Community Memory, a 1973 public computer network formed
in Berkeley by members of the Village of Arts
and Ideas commune, with today’s online social
communities like Twitter to show how the Bay
Area’s counterculture foreshadowed the World
Wide Web. “Open source and open spirit led to
the very structure of the internet,” Rinder says.
“Hippies were self-building in every way,” Castillo observes. “They created homes that could
Opposite: Howard Waite
home, Canyon, California, circa 1968, built by
Waite as a log cabin with
a curving hyperbolic
paraboloid roof. This page,
clockwise from top left: A
1970s towering “Madonna”
barge by sculptor Chris
Roberts and a “Spanish
Helmet” floating home in
Sausalito; a tepee-framed
bedroom from the 1973
book, Handmade Houses: A
Guide to the Woodbutch-er’s Art; Debra Bauer and
Rodney Price, members of
the Angels of Light; a driftwood and flotsam replica
of UC Berkeley’s Campanile
towers over the Emeryville
mudflats DIY sculpture
gallery from the 1970s.
