Review: Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia

Abstract

Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 23 October 2015–27 February 2016 Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan 18 June–9 October 2016 Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive 8 February–21 May 2017 In the summer of 1967 nearly 100,000 people made their way to San Francisco, converging in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood during what became known in the popular press as the “Summer of Love.” In retrospect, the events marked more a death knell than a climax, as those at the epicenter well knew. The Diggers, a local radical collective and street theater troupe, staged a funeral service on 6 October 1967 at Buena Vista Park in which participants carried and then set afire a coffin symbolizing the demise of the “hippie,” a figure they contended had been conjured by the mass media and commercialized to the point of losing any genuine cultural or political purchase. “Hippies” and 1967 continue to be easy signifiers, however, and in 2017 numerous cultural institutions in San Francisco dutifully organized commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Love. These included an exhibition at the de Young Museum focused on “art, fashion, and rock & roll” and local-history-centered shows at the California Historical Society and the San Francisco Public Library. On a different order from these mostly nostalgic and adulatory exhibitions was Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia , curated by Andrew Blauvelt. Originally staged at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the version at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) was augmented with items selected by guest curator and …