Postcard A5 Bill Owens – Altamont 1969

In 1969, the American photographer Bill Owens was asked to cover the free festival at the Altamont Freeway, where the Rolling Stones and many other iconic bands of the er played to a crowd of around 300,000 people. Owens was to capture images that are now frequently used to describe the tumultuous end of the 1960s, and with it the supposed decline of hippie ideals.

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Exhibition: BOHEMIA: History of an Idea, 1950–2000
Year: 2023
Format: A5

BOHEMIA: History of an Idea, 1950–2000

From its origins in mid nineteenth-century Paris, the idea of bohemia has been a powerful component of what it means to be an artist. Bohemia, a real place, has thus given its name to a cultural movement and a way of living. Its values have always centred around a commitment to art in all its forms, an embrace of total freedom, a hostility toward work and conventional ambition, and a willingness to accept poverty. This exhibition conveys new insights into the notion of bohemia as it developed from the end of World War II to the end of the twentieth century, across multiple places, including Paris, New York, London, San Francisco, Vancouver, Tehran, Zagreb, Prague, and Beijing. Apart from chronologically examining some of bohemia’s most emblematic scenes, it also looks at both the differences and the continuities that mark various manifestations of the movement, taking visitors on a journey through centres of bohemian life and communities of people who choose to live outside of mainstream values, creating their own artistic subcultures. Exhibition Bohemia: History of an Idea, 1950–2000 brings together artworks by thirty-seven artists, among them personalities as diverse as Alice Neel, Wolfgang Tillmans, Nan Goldin, Libuše Jarcovjáková, Bijan Saffari, Martin Wong, Stan Douglas, David Wojnarowicz, Roy Arden, and many others. Some of these artists will be shown alongside each other for the first time, and most of them have rarely had their work exhibited in the Czech Republic.