HTY/POL 301 Career Prep and HTY 339: Historiographical Essays and HTY 499/POL 499 Senior Seminar: Individualism and 60s CC

Homosexual men in San Francisco had started the 1960s interacting mostly in private, informal groups, meeting in bars and house parties. But by 1972, the city had a 'gay community' and 'gay pride, ' all celebrated with a parade. Through numerous organizations and publications, gay men created a counter-publicity to fight against their domination and subordination, and had begun to try to build a community that would foster deeper, more meaningful relationships with each other. The emergent counter-publicity and community in turn created the social spaces necessary for gay men to create an expanding range of possible meanings for their 'gayness, ' meanings that aligned more closely with their experiences and which better helped them meet their needs and desires. The gayness they created could expand and contract depending on the needs and circumstances of the individual or group. Rather than the typical story of the evolution from 'conservative' to 'radical' social movement, The Meaning of Gay sees the development of gay politics as the shift from the need to establish a public-facing gayness in the early 1960s, to the community building efforts that began in the mid-1960s, through the efforts to create a gayness based in authenticity, brotherhood, and revolution in the early 1970s. Each of these developments flowed from gay men's responses to the swiftly changing San Francisco and American environment. The dramatic explosion of possibilities for gayness that emerged during the 1960s may serve as a touchstone for those concerned with the problems of gay male life in the twenty-first century. This book traces these developments as they was recorded in the gay periodicals of the era, and analyzes them from the perspective of John Dewey's theory of mind, desire, public, valuation, and democratic communit

. In the heady and hallucinogenic days of the 1960s and OCO70s, a diverse range of artists and creative individuals based in the American WestOCofrom the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains and the SouthwestOCobroke the barriers between art and lifestyle and embraced the new, hybrid sensibilities of the countercultural movement. Often created through radically collaborative artistic practices, such works as Paolo SoleriOCOs earth homes, the hand-built architecture of the Drop City and Libre communes, Yolanda LpezOCOs political posters, the multisensory movement workshops of Anna and Lawrence Halprin, and the immersive light shows and video-based work by the Ant Farm and Optic Nerve collectives were intended to generate new life patterns that pointed toward social and political emancipation. In West of Center, Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner bring together a prominent group of scholars to elaborate the historical and artistic significance of these counterculture projects within the broader narrative of postwar American art, which skews heavily toward New YorkOCOs avant-garde art scene. This west of center countercultural movement has typically been associated with psychedelic art, but the contributors to this book understand this as only one dimension of the larger, artistically oriented, socially based phenomenon. At the same time, they reveal the disciplinary, geographic, and theoretical biases and assumptions that have led to the dismissal of countercultural practices in the history of art and visual culture, and they detail how this form of cultural and political activity found its place in the West. A companion to an exhibition originating at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, this book illuminates how, in the western United States, the countercultureOCOs unique integration of art practices, political action, and collaborative life activities serves as a linchpin connecting postwar and contemporary artistic endeavors.

Foreword : Memory as model / Lucy R. Lippard -- Introduction : The counterculture experiment : consciousness and encounters at the edge of art / Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner -- Part. I. Communal encounters. How to build a commune : Drop City's influence on the Southwestern Commune Movement / Erin Elder -- Collective movement : Anna and Lawrence Halprin's joint workshops / Eva J. Friedberg -- The Farm by the freeway / Jana Blankenship -- San Francisco video collectives and the counterculture / Deanne Pytlinski -- Part II. Handmade worlds -- Handmade genders : queer costuming in San Francisco circa 1970 / Julia Bryan-Wilson -- Libre, Colorado, and the hand-built home / Amy Azzarito -- Craft and the handmade at Paolo Soleri's communal settlements / Elissa Auther -- Pond Farm and the summer craft experience / Jenni Sorkin -- Expanded cinema in Los Angeles : the single wing turquoise bird / David E. James -- Paper walls : political posters in an age of mass media / Tom WIlson -- Part III. Cultural politics. The print culture of Yolanda M. López / Karen Mary Davalos -- The countercultural 'Indian' : visualizing retribalization at the human be-in / Mark Watson -- Goddess : feminist art and spirituality in the 1970s / Jennie Klein -- The revolution will be visualized : Black Panther artist Emory Douglas / Colette Gaiter -- Out of the closets, into the woods : the post-Stonewall emergence of queer anti-urbanism / Scott Herring -- Part IV. Altered consciousness. Naked pictures : Ansel Adams and the Esalen Institute / Suzanne Hudson -- Techniques of survival : the Harrisons and the environmental counterculture / Amanda Boetzkes -- Countercultural intoxication : an aesthetics of transformation / Mark Harris -- Everywhere present yet nowhere visible : Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Dharma art at the Naropa Institute / Bill Scheffe -- Signifying the ineffable : rock poster art and psychedelic counterculture in San Francisco / Scott B. Montgomery.

Amidst the recent flourishing of Sixties scholarship, Imagine Nation is the first collection to focus solely on the counterculture. Its fourteen provocative essays seek to unearth the complexity and rediscover the society-changing power of significant movements and figures.

Counterculture, while commonly used to describe youth-oriented movements during the 1960s, refers to any attempt to challenge or change conventional values and practices or the dominant lifestyles of the day. This fascinating three-volume set explores these movements in America from colonial times to the present in colorful detail. "American Countercultures" is the first reference work to examine the impact of countercultural movements on American social history. It highlights the writings, recordings, and visual works produced by these movements to educate, inspire, and incite action in all eras of the nation's history. A-Z entries provide a wealth of information on personalities, places, events, concepts, beliefs, groups, and practices. The set includes numerous illustrations, a topic finder, primary source documents, a bibliography and a filmography, and an index.