West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977. Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, November 10th 2011-February 19th 2012.

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. The exhibition West of Center illuminates 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 presents 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 bring 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 Emory Douglas, the Ant Farm collective, and the lesbian-feminist intentional communities of southern Oregon.

Mountain Ghosts. University of Colorado at Colorado Springs campus, Colorado Springs, CO, 2011.

Mountain Ghosts (2011) is a site-specific project by Boston-based sound artist Halsey Burgund that operates through an interactive application loaded on smartphones for use on the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs campus. Building on Burgund's interest in systems, collected voices, and participation, Mountain Ghosts explores sound as fundamental to our experiences of space and place. Participants use smartphones to make audio recordings that the Mountain Ghosts system then codes by location and immediately assimilates into a collective databank for other visitors to access. As participants walk through the UCCS campus, they respond to prompts on the Mountain Ghosts interface that invite them to reflect on their surroundings and contribute recordings of their thoughts and experiences. For the duration of the project from September 8th to mid-November, 2011, Mountain Ghosts folds individual voices into a collective archive that creatively documents a unique sonic record of actions within the landscape.




Upstarts & Matriarchs: Jewish Women Artists and the Transformation of American Art. Singer Gallery, Mizel Center for Arts and Culture, Denver, CO, 2005.

Upstarts & Matriarchs brought together work by Jewish women artists who were instrumental to the tremendous expansion of American art that took place in the 1970s and 1980s concurrent with the rise of the feminist art movement and its legacy. The exhibition also included work by younger Jewish women artists who continue to move the definition of art forward.