Drop City trailer from Joan Grossman on Vimeo.
Facebook
Twitter
Google+
Email
“They discovered the joys of dynamite.”
In 1965, in the-middle-of-nowhere Colorado, artists Clark Richert and Gene Bernofsky came across a parcel of land to call their own. Buying it for $450, they and other vagabonds set out to construct a new civilization in the place they called Drop City.
They weren’t exactly hippies—Richert threw aside the term—but a rebellious counterculture spirit was palpable. Likewise, art-making was central to their pursuit of new truths.
While copious amounts of acid might very well have been dropped, Richert says the name Drop City instead derived from “drop art,” a form of art-making they invented and perfected. Its main thesis involves dropping things—rocks, mattresses, a piano—from great heights, then surveying the damage and the perplexed reactions of passersby. Pattern-making and dimensionality also played a large role, as seen in the numerous geodesic domes that dotted the landscape.
After the demise of Drop City, Richert and other members of the so-called Criss-Cross cooperative continued with systematic pattern painting. This 2012 documentary by Joan Grossman helps tell the story, while two new exhibitions—Clark Richert in hyperspace, at MCA Denver, and Clark Richert: Pattern and Dimensions, at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art—dive into Drop City and the multifaceted mind of its co-founder.
