Museum of New Mexico Media Center Press Release

Counter Culture movement in New Mexico

El Palacio Magazine

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 27, 2008

MEDIA CONTACT

Counter Culture Movement in New Mexico

Documented in Recent Issue of El Palacio

Santa Fe, NM (WebPR, March 27, 2008)—The Counter Culture of the 1960s in New Mexico is documented in the pages of the most recent edition of the quarterly publication of the Museum of New Mexico, El Palacio.

Featured is an interview with Lisa Law, known for her photographs of 1960s Counter Culture life in America and such icons as Bob Dylan, Dennis Hopper, Andy Warhol, and Janis Joplin. The issue is richly illustrated throughout with Lisa Law’s photographs, mostly from the New Buffalo Commune founded in 1967 near Taos, New Mexico.

The issue also covers Flower Power: The Subversive Botanical, the current exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art. The famous image by photographer Bernie Boston, Flower Power (1967) greets visitors entering the gallery. This is the iconic image of the young man placing a daisy in the rifle of a National Guardsman. The exhibition traces the appearance of the daisy in works of art and design over a forty-year period. During this time, the flower assumed additional meaning related to class realignments, gender divisions, commercial appeal, and utopian ideals. The work of Corita Kent, artist, activist, and Catholic nun is in the exhibition, as are Andy Warhol’s Daisy to the more contemporary art of Erika Wannemacher and Takashi Murakami.

Jack Loeffler, with many credits to his name, among them, aural historian, author of Adventures with Ed: A Portrait of Abbey, and sound collage artist wrote the feature article on the movement in New Mexico, Counter Culture in the Land of Clear Light.

He and his wife were fixtures on the New Mexico scene since 1962. His article places a tradition of alternative life styles in New Mexico into a historical and national context. Starting with Mable Dodge Luhan and D.H. Lawrence in Taos in the late 1920s, he traces the development of the Counter Culture in America through the Beat Generation in New York and California in the 1950s with such figures as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, and William S. Burroughs. He follows their disciples as they move to New Mexico’s communes – New Buffalo, Morningstar, Lama Foundation, the Hog Farm, and the Reality Construction Company. Loeffler says, “ Taos County became the communal proving ground; at one point the hippie population of the county came in at over 15 percent!” He concludes his article by saying that these communes brought people to New Mexico whose influence can still be felt in New Mexico’s culture today.

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El Palacio was first published in 1913, one year after New Mexico reached statehood. El Palacio, “the palace,” refers to the Palace of the Governors, the first museum in what is historically referred to as “the Museum of New Mexico,” which was established in 1909. El Palacio covers the art, culture and history of the Southwest, with a focus on the exhibits and programs of Museum of International Folk Art, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology, New Mexico Museum of Art, Palace of the Governors/New Mexico History Museum, New Mexico State Monuments, and Office of Archaeological Studies.

Media Contacts:

Cheryle Mano Mitchell, Managing Editor

505-476-1146

cheryle.mitchell@state.nm.us

Steve Cantrell, PR Manager

505-476-1144

505-310-3539 – cell

steve.cantrell@state.nm.us

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