by MIKE CHAIKEN
CTFashionMag.com
On the main floor of the Museum at Bethel Woods, the permanent exhibit explores the musical, political and sociological atmosphere that led up to the Woodstock music festival. But downstairs, a visiting exhibit reminds patrons that art and fashion helped define the 1960s as well.
“Lights Color Fashion” features clothes and rock posters of the 1960s collected by artist Gary Westford. The exhibit opened in April at the museum in Bethel, N.Y., which celebrates the memories of Woodstock.
The museum is built adjacent to the grounds of the famed music festival.
Westford, who was a “socially aware” college wrestler at the time of Woodstock, said he thought his collection would enlighten, inform and entertain those with an interest in the era.
“A standard ‘blanket statement’ for the 1960s is that it was all about ‘sex, drugs, and rock and roll’,” said Westford. “That is certainly part of the equation, but not all of it.”
Westford said that in addition to enjoying the “visual dimension” of the exhibit, he wants visitors to think about how they items “fit into the spectrum of time, and how can we take the best aspects of the era based on the work seen in the show, and move forward individually and collectively with clarity and hope for a better society for America and the world.”
“I would also say that this Bethel Woods exhibition holds a unique mirror up to our current and very difficult 21st century time and place,” said Westford, who in addition to being a “representational and narrative painter/conceptual artist” is a museum curator.
“The late 1960s was a miraculous and sobering era in American culture and the world,” said Westford. “We landed on the moon, rode across the country on motorcycles, and protested on the streets of cities in search of equity, peace, women’s, and gay rights, and saving our earth’s environment. We made love and wanted to end a war where too many young soldiers died.”
“Coming of age in the 1960s, especially in the (San Francisco) Bay Area, I felt as if I was both witness to and participant in a very important time developmentally in American history in the arenas of new societal, cultural, music, fashion and individual identities,” said Westford.
“There was a palpable sense of freedom and change in the air (during the 1960s), and I personally felt that all things were possible: that we could end war and racism and solve our global environmental problems,” said Westford.
Westford began collecting the rock posters that fill the exhibit after he moved to San Francisco for college in 1968.
“I lived in the lower Haight Ashbury/Fillmore area, essentially the ‘home’ of the counter-culture movement in San Francisco,” said Westford. “I began to attend music concerts at Winterland, and Fillmore Auditorium, where they would give you a psychedelic poster for the next week’s concert.”
“As a young artist, I immediately was impressed by their ‘out of the box’ approaches to style, color and use of surreal imagery,” said Westford of the artwork in the exhibit. “For me they were visual records of a special time and place that I wanted to collect and preserve.”
“I bought most of my early posters (which advertise bands such as the Grateful Dead and solo artists like Howlin’ Wolf) at head shops on Haight Street when you could buy them for five dollars,” said Westford. “By the time I left San Francisco in 1970, I had collected 25 posters, all hung with thumb tacks on my apartment wall.”
As for why the fashion that fills the hall in Bethel fleshed out the story he was trying to tell, Westford explained, “I have always been interesting in dressing well, and in 1969 I got a job working as a salesperson at Bally Lo Boutique on Union Avenue in downtown San Francisco. It was one of the hippest young women’s boutiques in the city. The boutique featured lower-end couture design that was very cool, but not affordable for most ‘street’ hippies.”
“At a certain point (during organizing the exhibit) I realized that given the wide-open fashion sensibilities of the 1960s, it made perfect sense to show clothing together with the posters,” said Westford.
Westford explained, “Rock and roll and personal fashion decisions personified a free-wheeling, open-ended and experimental response to the time. Musicians like (Jimi) Hendrix and The Doors literally electrified world audiences with their sounds and lyrics.”
“For the first time fashion couture designers took their clues from the street,” said Westford. “In fashion, a world view evolved that honored –and appropriated- design from Native American, African, and Middle Eastern cultures,” said Westford.
Westford, who said Hendrix, Santana and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were his favorite Woodstock performers, connected with the Bethel Woods Museum by sending a blind proposal to its director Wade Lawrence ” He and museum co-curator Julia Fell immediately responded enthusiastically,” said Westford.
The Museum at Bethel Woods is part of the Bethel Center for the Arts on Hurd Road, Bethel, N.Y. It is built adjacent to the grounds where the Woodstock music festival was held in 1969. The museum, which features a permanent exhibit about the festival, is open Monday through Sunday, opening at 10 a.m. each day. Tickets are available at BethelWoodsCenter.org.