The 1960s Revisited: The Significance of the Trips Festival

The California Historical Society, kicks off its new exhbit on the exact 50th anniversary of one of the most celebrated events of the 1960s counterculture: The Trips Festival.

Associate Professor of Architecture Greg Castillo joins a panel to discuss the signficance of the Trips Festival and its signifcance on San Francisco’s mid-1960s counterculture movement and the emerging personal computer era. The Trips Festival is considered a watershed event in the history of San Francisco’s underground arts scene, the launch of the psychedelic 1960s era, and a pivotal event in the growth of the region’s technology industry. 

Greg Castillo has investigated the Bay Area’s counterculture design legacy through a U.C. Berkeley Arts Research Center Fellowship (2014) and an Associate Professor Fellowship from the Townsend Center for the Humanities. His research informed a 2014 exhibition, Design Radicals: Creativity and Protest in Wurster Hall, reviewing “outlaw design” enterprises undertaken by faculty and students in the late-1960s and early-1970s at U.C. Berkeley. For the catalogue of the Walker Art Center exhibition on counterculture design,Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, Castillo contributed the essay “Counterculture Terroir: California’s Hippie Enterprise Zone” and delivered a public lecture at the exhibition’s opening symposium.

Castillo will serve as Guest Curator for the expanded Hippie Modernism exhibition when it travels to the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive in February 2017.