House occupied by Group 212 during the late sixties

Bob Liikala’s Group 212 Inter-Media Project exhibit at the Historical Society of Woodstock will close September 6th. Liikala has been on hand since the August 8th opening to guide visitors and discuss the project’s formation and history. He will not be present the final weekend. The show may be viewed on Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m.

 The 212 project ran summer retreats from 1967 to 1969 in the old Holiday Country Inn midway between Saugerties and Woodstock on Route 212. It was briefly home to professionals in the visual arts, music, performing arts, filmmaking and sciences. The collective fostered a collaborative meeting point and simplified time and space constraints for the participating artists. It encouraged them to experiment with the diverse new media and helped them to explore and synthesize the exploding potentials then being articulated through happenings, expanded cinema, environmental music and multimedia theater, dance and sculpture. Some of the projects that emerged in 1967 included Meredith Monk’s Blueprint, which was presented at Montreal’s Expo 67; Horse Play, a happening incorporating animals and audience members by Yayoi Kusama; and Dump Tour, a multimedia event directed by Franklin “Bud” Drake that featured a “deluxe” buffet, champagne, an art auction/burning, an airplane assault involving paper airplanes and White Mass choreographed by Norma Lusk. 

Group 212 was a manifestation of the exploding Woodstock artistic scene—as were the Sound-Outs. Bud Drake’s mother, Pan Copeland, presided over the latter on her farm just up the road. According to Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival: The Backstory to “Woodstock,” Pan hoped to craft these concerts into a Newport festivals of rock. Musical acts like the Blues Magoos, Fear Itself, Richie Havens, Tim Hardin, Kenny Rankin, Billy Batson, Children of God and many others were known to have performed at her field.