50 YEARS WOODSTOCK - The Exhibition

19. June 2019

Woodstock Elliot Landy

50 JAHRE WOODSTOCK - Die Ausstellung

Only a few singular music events have shaped an entire generation and acted like a beacon for many decades. The festival on the inconspicuous pastures of a dairy farmer in Bethel, 70 kilometres from the eponymous Woodstock, is definitely one of them. The film is cult. The large travelling exhibition "Elliott Landy Woodstock Vision. 50 Years Woodstock. The Exhibition" now reports once again about the magic days in August '69, when the hippie spirit was at its zenith.

Whether there will be a new Woodstock edition in 2019 is suddenly open again. Sponsors have jumped off the grid and have thus thrown the plans overboard. "Woodstock Music & Art Fair presents An Aquarius Exhibition - 3 Days Of Peace & Music", the full name of the legendary festival that took place from August 15 to 18, 1969, symbolized the spirit of Love & Peace like no other event. The US society of those days was deeply divided. The country was at war in Southeast Asia. At home, the deadly attacks on John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had poisoned the social climate. The counterculture also and especially formed in Woodstock with its estimated half a million visitors. Three (actually four) days in which rock greats such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, Jefferson Airplane or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were to strengthen the sense of community against war and for music, peace and free love. The official photographer in Woodstock was Elliott Landy, born in 1942. His iconic pictures of Joplin or Joe Cocker on stage in Woodstock, but also famous covers of LPs like "Music From Big Pink" (The Band) or "Nashville Skyline" (Bob Dylan) have captured the zeitgeist.

The exhibition of Landys pictures, which is now being conceived for the 50th anniversary, will not be shown in the USA, but at special locations in Europe - in the Netherlands in Emmen (29.6.-2.9.), in Italy in Rome (11.7.-7.9.), in the Netherlands in Emmen (29.6.-2.9.), and in the United States in the Netherlands in Emmen (11.7.-7.9.).) and Bari (13.9.-17.11.) as well as in Germany in Papenburg (29.6.-2.9.), Karlsruhe (8.8.-15.9.) and Nuremberg (16.8.-30.9.) (in planning: Amsterdam, Berlin, Luxembourg), each time in a slightly different form. The show lives entirely from Landys photographs, from his artistic visions. The exhibition will be presented at a cozy press conference at the "House of Glock'n'Roll" in Nuremberg, where both Landy and the exhibition organizers, the brothers Michael and Markus Steffen, will be present. Landy sees his idea of Woodstock as a cultural and spiritual event realized here, as he did previously in his book "Woodstock Vision. The Spirit Of A Generation" (2009): "We have integrated all sections of my book into the exhibition. So not just the festival, but also peace demos and celebrities to capture the zeitgeist as a whole. Woodstock did not come out of nowhere, but was already the result of a social awakening."

INFOS woodstock-exhibition.com

Read more in the current issue ...