Drop City

Peter Rabbit.

New York: Olympia Press, 1971. In photographic wraps. First edition. 4 1/4 x 7 in. 163pp. Black-and-white photographs throughout text. Very good.

The rare account from one of the founders of one of the earliest rural hippie communes of the 1960’s.

A countercultural artists’ community founded in southern Colorado in 1965 and abandoned in the early 1970s, Drop City was started by four art students engaged in drop art, or droppings. Drop Art was informed by the geodesic domes of R. Buckminster Fuller, and the art happenings of Allan Kaprow and the Black Mountain College. Garnering media attention, the commune soon grew beyond the small artists’ group who founded it, and at its height hosted the Joy Festival in 1967, attracting hundreds of people, many of whom continued to live there. This scarce book, written by a founding member of the commune, chronicles the rise and fall of the iconic community.