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Revolution show flashes back to city's paisley past, installation [Vancouver Museum, ongoing]
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“Groove on Vancouver as the hippie capital of Canada. Visit the hippies’ communal house, try on some macramé finery, and listen to great Vancouver bands from the late 1960s. Look for your mom or dad – or yourself – in swinging footage of the Stanley Park Be-In and the Retinal Circus nightclub.”
So reads the invitation to the Vancouver Museum’s newest permanent exhibition, featuring memorabilia from the “Summer of Love” and beyond. The exhibition chronicles the late 60s to the mid-70s, a period during which the quiet and conservative city of Vancouver began to undergo tremendous social changes. Sparked by the anti-war and environmental movements, Vancouver began to hear the public voice of its people as they protested freeway developments, the Vietnam war, food preservatives and nuclear bombs while extolling “free speech”, women’s liberation, birth control, Greenpeace and civil rights.
The show includes a re-created hippie pad in a dilapidated Arts and Crafts-style setting decorated with psychedelic posters and Salvation Army furniture. It re-visits the dance clubs, Retinal Circus and the Afterthought, Stanley Park’s “Be-Ins” and the Dewdney Trunk Road “Pleasure Faire”. Other prototypical artefacts include embroidered clothing, jewellery, protest signs, “little books” of poetry, drug paraphernalia and music by Mock Duck and the Seeds of Time – in all, a great trip down memory lane for aging boomers and the curious.
www.vanmuseum.bc.ca
