The Artist in the Counterculture Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge

The 1960s exert a special fascination in modern art. But most accounts miss the defining impact of the period's youth culture, largely incubated in California, on artists who came of age in that decade. As their prime exemplar, Bruce Conner, reminisced, "I did everything that everybody did in 1967 in the Haight-Ashbury. . . . I would take peyote and walk out in the streets." And he vividly channeled those experiences into his art, while making his mark on every facet of the psychedelic movement―from the mountains of Mexico with Timothy Leary to the rock ballrooms of San Francisco to the gilded excesses of the New Hollywood. In
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