BETHEL, NY.- The Museum at Bethel Woods welcomes the special exhibit, Across the Great Divide: Photographs by Roberta Price, a loving photographic diary of Roberta Price’s seven years as a resident of Libre, a commune in the Huerfano Valley in southern Colorado. The special exhibit opens on Thursday, August 2 and runs through Monday, December 31, exploring the back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s and ’70s.

The exhibition is a photographic memoir of Ms. Price, which serves as a point of departure for examining the place of autonomy and community, capturing the hope, optimism and utopian promise that fueled that period. What had begun as a grant-funded research project became a personal journey, documenting the work, play, relations and structures of hippies, communes, architecture, countercultural luminaries and the events in the Southwest in the late 1960s and ’70s. During this time period, Ms. Price took over 3,500 photographs of rural commune life in the Southwest; where she was at first a participating observer and then an observing participant.

Ms. Price explains that the title of the exhibit comes from the “cultural divide between generations in the late ’60s and the ’70s, and to the temporal divide across which we now view these images.” When describing the exhibit Ms. Price hopes that, “the subjects of these photographs speak to you directly, conveying in equal parts the creativity, foolishness, youth, and idealistic fervor of this chapter of American utopian history -- an epic generational foray into the art of the possible.”

Now living in Albuquerque and working as an intellectual property attorney, Ms. Price is an award-winning author, speaker, and photographer. Her 2004 book Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture was chosen as one of the Top Ten University Press Books of that year. The exhibition is in conjunction with her second book, Across the Great Divide: A Photo Chronicle of the Counterculture (UNM Press, 2010) which won the Forward gold medal for photography books in 2010. Curated by Mary Anne Redding, Curator of Photography, New Mexico History Museum, the exhibit concludes a four-venue tour at The Museum at Bethel Woods before Price's photo collection becomes a part of the Yale University Beincke Library permanent collection. The Museum at Bethel Woods is proud to be a co-sponsor of this exhibition tour along with 516 ARTS, Albuquerque, New Mexico.