In a decade, a whirlwind of change

In 1960, demonstrators in downtown Bennington joined nationwide protests that pushed the Woolworth’s chain to end segregation of its lunch counters in the South. This photo, from the May 1960 Bennington College Bulletin, was credited to Jon L. Allen and is included in the new exhibit “Fields of Change: 1960s Vermont” at the Bennington Museum. Courtesy Bennington Museum

 

By TELLY HALKIAS
Contributing writer

BENNINGTON, Vt.

Bob Dylan warned what seemed like the entire world in the title track of his 1964 album that the times they were a-changin’.

But his song could have been an anthem for the sweeping changes that were reshaping Vermont in the 1960s, planting the seeds of a progressive-minded harvest in the decades that followed.
In recognition of the deep social, political and cultural changes of that decade, the Bennington Museum opened two exhibitions in late June that together explore a time of upheaval in the Green Mountain State.

“Fields of Change: 1960s Vermont,” which focuses on the social and political aspects of the decade, is on view through Nov. 3. A companion show, “Color Fields: 1960s Bennington Modernism,” which runs through Dec. 30, examines how artists connected with Bennington College were pushing the possibilities of abstraction with their spare, color-based works, blazing a path that would inspire other American artists of the era.

Jamie Franklin, the museum’s curator of collections, said that as the early rumblings of discontent with the Vietnam War were heard across the nation, “even tiny Vermont was not immune to these forces.”

“During the 1960s, many changes were afoot in the Green Mountain state,” Franklin said. “While some interactions were peaceful and led to open discussion, others had more serious consequences.”

Tensions ran high between longtime Vermonters, who often held tightly to their traditional lifestyles, and the dramatic changes occurring around them as newcomers flocked to the state.
With construction of the interstate highway system, Franklin explained, Vermont became more accessible from the urban centers of the Northeast, and the resulting arrival of thousands of “flatlanders” was one of the defining characteristics of change in Vermont during the 1960s.
“While some changes were met with less confrontation, others were quite severe,” Franklin said.
Many of the newcomers were part of the youthful counterculture of the era and were strongly influenced by the anti-war and back-to-the-land movements.

 

Seeking peace and nature
As the United and States was drawn deeper into the Vietnam War, Franklin said, opposition to the war emerged across all elements of society and demographics, but most especially among young people.

 

Young people in Bennington joined a nationwide rally in 1969 calling for a halt to the Vietnam War. Greg Guma photo/courtesy Bennington Museum

The back-to-the-landers, inspired by books such as Helen and Scott Nearing’s “The Good Life,” sought an agrarian lifestyle and an economy they hoped would offer a middle ground between capitalism and socialism. Coming from more urban areas, they saw in Vermont the possibility of inexpensive land and, in come cases, the possibility of communal living arrangements.
“Fields of Change” takes stock of these phenomena through a visual cornucopia of memorabilia and ephemera from the era. Dozens of items, some from the museum’s permanent collection along with contributions from local citizens and other key figures of the 1960s, are included in the exhibition.

The show is divided thematically into subject matters to help explain the clash of cultures and how it played out both statewide and in Bennington. Some of the titles of these sections include: “Welcoming the Masses – Vermont’s Interstate Highways,” “Shifting Political Tides,” “Vermont and the Civil Rights Movement,” and “Mount Anthony Union High School: A Center of Progressive Education and Local Culture.”

One prominent event of the era that’s reviewed in “Fields of Change” is the The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, a massive nationwide protest and teach-in staged on Oct. 15, 1969.
“Here in Bennington, the Moratorium involved people going door-to-door to disseminate materials and other information regarding the war and why it should end,” Franklin said. “Just down the street from here at the local National Guard Armory, Governor Phil Hoff spoke to a large crowd of protestors. This was followed up that same evening with a major rally up at the Bennington Battle Monument.”

The exhibit includes a recollection by the late R. Arnold Ricks III, a longtime Bennington College history professor, describing protestors marching up Monument Avenue and around the monument.

When they encountered some spectators who didn’t share their views, Franklin said, “the marchers remained peaceful and everyone broke out in song” to The Youngbloods’ “Get Together.”

 

Spurring local debates
The cultural clashes of the era also played out in more localized controversies.
One section of the exhibit focuses on Bennington’s Mount Anthony Union High School, which was designed by award-winning architect Ben Thompson and opened to students in the fall of 1967. The school was a physical expression of the dramatic way Vermont was turning toward more liberal ideas in the 1960s.

The school’s administration, supported by the state Board of Education and other local educators, embraced progressive education and often stimulated debate in the community.
On display is a poster for a school play in 1969, “Brecht on Brecht,” a sampler of the German playwright’s work. The poster showed an American flag shining through a swastika and a red, dripping, seemingly bloody font, designed by Lon Wasco, an art teacher at the high school.
This was the opening salvo in what local journalist Greg Guma, who covered local school controversies as a reporter for the Bennington Banner beginning in 1968, once described as “a struggle for power between two factions – working class traditionalists and middle-class modernists” at the school.

Franklin said other controversies at the Mount Anthony campus included “the teaching of a poem by United States poet laureate Howard Nemerov, who had been a teacher at Bennington College a few years earlier, that included sexual references.” That, he said, led to “an outcry by a small but vocal group of parents and school board members.”

 

Political, structural changes
Tyler Resch, a contributor to the show and former editor-in-chief of the Bennington Banner from 1963-65 and 1968-78, arrived in Bennington in 1961 and still lives in Shaftsbury.
Resch said the 1960s saw a sea change in Vermont politics, as a state once “known for rigid conservatism” began its transformation into one “that’s counted on nationally as bluest of the blue.”

Hoff, the governor shown speaking to the Bennington anti-war rally in one of the exhibit photos, became the state’s first Democratic governor since before the Civil War when he first won election in 1962. And he became one of the first Democratic governors in the nation to break with President Lyndon Johnson over the war.

Resch suggested one of the most profound political changes in Vermont in the 1960s was the shift of power away from the state’s individual towns, which were mostly rural.

“Vermont towns, say, in the 1950s, had fairly rigid boundaries,” Resch said. “Each town had its own reasons for identity -- its own school system, its own legislator regardless of population, its own system of assessment and taxation, its own zoning ordinance, if any, and a sense of municipal autonomy, if not near isolation.”

But after union high-school districts came into effect, they forced alliances with other towns. And the “one person, one vote” standard established by a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision forced states to redraw their political maps so that legislators would represent roughly equal numbers of voters.

This led, Resch explained, to “reapportionment of the Legislature, which caused small towns to share legislators and large ones to split into districts.”

The change gave more political clout to the state’s more densely populated communities just as a new influx of people was changing them demographically.

How art interprets life
The changes that were sweeping Vermont’s politics and social structures in the 1960s had parallels and echoes in the art world, and some of those trends are explored in complementary exhibition “Color Fields: 1960s Bennington Modernism.”

The show examines the influence of Bennington College during the 1960s as home base for a group of artists whose abstract experimentation in lean, color-based paintings came to be known collectively as Color Field. The show includes paintings as well as related color-based sculptures and other works by Pat Adams, Anthony Caro, Paul Feeley, Helen Frankenthaler, Ruth Ann Fredenthal, Patricia Johanson, Vincent Longo, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski.

“Many of these works make use of the soak stain technique, perhaps the most defining element of the Color Field movement,” Franklin said. “Thinned paints are applied to raw, unprimed canvas to create luminous areas of pure color that soak into and become one with the surface of the canvas.”

The artists were all deeply interested in process and tested new techniques and materials, such as “spray guns, imprinted textures, serialized formal strategies and new acrylic media,” to explore new aesthetic possibilities, he explained.

One of the contributors to the exhibit is Tom Fels, an independent curator, author, artist and critic who knows well the creative and cultural vibes of the 1960s. Fels chronicled his time at a western Massachusetts commune, Montague Farm, and the farm’s aftermath, in the critically acclaimed books “Farm Friends” (2008, Rural Science Institute) and “Buying the Farm” (2012, University of Massachusetts Press).

Fels described the “surge of creativity in the Color Field movement” and agreed with Franklin that the works “were a direct reflection of societal upheaval.”

In the midst of so much change in the 1960s, Fels said, Bennington and the surrounding area, and especially Bennington College, provided “an exciting place for all the arts.”

“During these years, Bennington College was a magnet for important artists, curators and teachers of art, as well as corresponding figures in music, dance, theater and literature,” Fels said. “The college’s ties to New York, then the undisputed center of the art world, assured exhibitions and ideas, transmitted in teaching, of the most contemporary vintage.”

 

For more information about “Fields of Change: 1960s Vermont” and “Color Fields: 1960s Bennington Modernism,” visit benningtonmuseum.org or call (802) 447-1571.