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. Often created through radically collaborative artistic practices, such works as Paolo Soleri's earth homes, the hand-built architecture of the Drop City and Libre communes, Yolanda López's 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 York's 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 counterculture's unique integration of art practices, political action, and collaborative life activities serves as a linchpin connecting postwar and contemporary artistic endeavors.

'Ana's death is one of millions that, despite four decades of feminist struggle, remain underestimated?social crimes that have yet to be fully confronted. . . . The very directness of the graphic novella is an ideal vehicle for the outrage women feel about the extent of domestic and general violence against us. May there be many more visual outcries like this one, to avenge the loss of women like Ana Mendieta.'?Lucy Lippard, from the introduction

Who Is Ana Mendieta? is a cultural biography of a Cuban American feminist artist working on the cusp of rebellion and regression. Jackson Pollock careens into a tree, killing another and himself; Frida Kahlo begins to be received as a significant painter, not only the muse of Diego Rivera; William Burroughs plays William Tell with an apple on his wife's head; Carolee Schneemann pulls a feminist screed out of her vagina and reads it aloud at a performance; Valerie Solanas shoots Andy Warhol. Ana Mendieta, whose bold work about the female body and violence was changing the course of art history, 'went out the window' of the New York City apartment she shared with her husband, sculptor Carl Andre, at the height of her career. Andre was tried and acquitted of her murder, and the legacy of Mendieta has been shrouded ever since.

Christine Redfern and Caro Caron are artists living and working in Montreal.

Lucy Lippard is an internationally known curator, artist, and writer.

In this “excellent” (The Baltimore Sun) book, Lucy R. Lippard weaves together cultural criticism, anthropology, and community activism for an in-depth look at how tourism sites are conceived and represented, and how they affect the places they transform. Critic Andrew Ross calls Lippard “the most surefooted tour guide you could hope for” in her exploration of being a tourist in one’s own home, of how advertising and photography define place, of how antique shops function as populist museums, and of the commodification of indigenous cultures. With her characteristic breadth and critical eye, Lippard discusses the political economies of leisure spaces, the tourist’s fascination with tragic destinations (such as the sites of massacres and nuclear weapons tests, or Holocaust memorials), and our willingness to let national parks and heritage sites define nature and history.