There are exceptions to the documentarian format

West of Center, now at Mills College Art Museum, remembers the activities of seven experimental groups that operated in the American West between 1965 and 1977. Each consisted of young people who rejected postwar consumerism and bourgeois individualism in favor of collective living, Eastern-inspired mysticism, and the empowerment of marginalized groups. "Hippie" is the usual tag for the type.

Obviously, the hippie movement is far from an arcane subject. Yet, this exhibition renders the phenomenon curiously alien — a partial victory, as it turns out. On the one hand, West of Center happily eschews whatever psychedelic-styled caricatures probably come to mind when you think of "hippie art" and instead shows specimens that are more interesting — or ought to be. Unfortunately,Power monitor the sense of distance is equally a result of the exhibition reading like an anthropology textbook. Not exactly a page-turner.

In keeping with hippie values, the exhibition replaces the typical centrality of the art object with the idea that the featured counterculture experiments were themselves a form of art practice. Indeed, for pioneering choreographer Anna Halprin, who headed the San Francisco Dancer's Workshop in her Marin county home, or the inhabitants of Drop City, who built a community around geodesic dome architecture in the Colorado plains, or The Cockettes, a San Francisco-based theater troupe that engaged in perpetual performance involving harlequin, gender-bending dress, and often public acts, art merged with life to a degree that the two became indistinguishable.

Consequently, West of Center consists primarily of photographs, videos, publications, miscellaneous ephemera, and other secondary forms of documentation that portray these groups and their life-as-art ethos. At best, the result is rich and illuminating. The loftily ambitious Drop City, for example, summoned a documentary impulse worthy of itself; the photographs on display coalesce into a vivid gestalt of the isolated, idealistic community and its impressive habitations. On the other hand, the two vitrines devoted to Southern Oregon's feminist collectives are almost repellently dry, modestly displayed as though to suggest that the chapter need only be skimmed.

There are exceptions to the documentarian format. Light show artists The Single Wing Turquoise Bird present "Invisible Writing," a fantastically trippy, 2011 video in the style of their early work, complete with mysterious flashing glyphs and pulsing, streaming colors. The Drop City chapter includes "The Ultimate Painting," a comparably psychedelic spinning wheel and strobe-light contraption that members of the commune created to visually monumentalize their belief in sacred geometry. Accompanying a section on the Ant Farm, another group devoted to experimental architecture, is a true-to-scale model of one of its signature inflatable pyramid shelters. Yet even standing inside the fluctuating plastic environment, one feels as though studying an artifact of a culture that vanished — or was vanquished — long, long ago.

The roads are not divided by a line, the yards are manicured and there is a notable absence of side fences. Basketball hoops stand tall against the curb, while sprinklers enhance the lush green grass and kids ride around the 30-miles-per-hour streets on their bicycles. This is Strathmore, the Levitt brothers-built subdivision in Stony Brook and it is now in its 50th year.

In 1963, Stony Brook was identified as the perfect place to begin constructing another of the Levitt and Sons specialty: assembly-line manufacturing of mass-produced housing for middle income families.

In a 1963 interview with the Three Village Herald, the real-estate developing firm's president, William Levitt, said Suffolk County was the fastest growing county in New York and the second-fastest growing county in the country.

The housing models on offer at Stony Brook were put on display on Birdseye Circle. The Framingham was one of the most expensive of the house models that potential homeowners could choose from, available for $26,990 in 1963.

Levitt and Sons began the settlement by purchasing 650 acres in property, formally announced in April of that year. The area was divided into sections based on different letters: S, B, O, P, H and M. As the developers began construction, families began to move into the neighborhood — and some have stayed there ever since.

Denise Johnson, 62, has called Strathmore home since December 1963, when her parents relocated from Nassau County. The Strathmore subdivision had just been established and many houses were still under construction, resulting in what Johnson called a "very barren, very new" community.

"The residents here were quite resentful," said Johnson, recalling the first few years of her life at Strathmore. "We were kind of seen as the intruders that they didn't really want and we were known as the Levitt people from the city."

Levitt and Sons tried to instill a sense of community, belonging and pride of place within the communities that they established, using a system of covenants to encourage residents to take ownership of their neighborhood.

Some of the conditions stipulated in a Strathmore covenant were a requirement to mow the lawn once a week; the prohibition of boats, trucks or trailers parked on the property; and a request to only hang laundry in the backyard and not on Sundays or holidays.
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