TSPTR SS26: The Automatic Handwriting of the Counterculture

2026-03-11

In the 1960s, art and rebellion were basically the same thing. From the neon lights of LA's Pop Art scene to the desert hum of Taos, TSPTR SS26 captures the defining moments of the American counterculture.

In the 1960s, art and rebellion were basically the same thing.

When Andy Warhol brought his first West Coast show to the Ferus Gallery in 1961, Los Angeles lit up. Pop Art, Feminist Art, radical Black art, suddenly the city was a pressure cooker of cultural revolution.

One of the people in the room that night was a young actor named Dennis Hopper. He’d just started experimenting with photography, and over the next decade he’d end up documenting some of the defining moments of the civil rights era and the American counterculture. Along the way he became close with artists like Ed Ruscha and Warhol himself.

But the story doesn’t stay in LA.

About 900 miles east sits Taos—a small desert town that’s been a magnet for outsiders for nearly a century. Writers like D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and painter Georgia O'Keeffe all passed through, drawn by the landscape and the strange creative energy in the mountains.

By the late ’60s, the counterculture followed.

After defining the era with Easy Rider, Hopper bought a sprawling adobe house in Taos in 1970 and filled it with artists, drifters and hippies. He edited footage for The Last Movie there, screened rough cuts in the local theater, then eventually bought the place and turned it into a home and studio. Taos never really let him go. Hopper was buried there in 2010.

And the town still hums—literally. Locals call it the Taos Hum: a low, unexplained vibration in the desert air. Call it myth. Call it altitude. Or call it what artists have been chasing there for a century:

a place where strange ideas feel possible.

AND BACK TO LA!

LOS ANGELES: WHERE MODERN ART WENT WEIRD

In 1965, the California Institute of Modern Art opened a new campus in Century City, right in the middle of a Los Angeles that was rapidly becoming one of the most experimental art scenes in the world. Because California has always run on myth.

Sunshine, movies, endless reinvention—Southern California built a culture where new ideas could move fast. Galleries and museums popped up across the city, and a new generation of collectors started backing artists who were responding to a very modern reality: television, advertising, and a world drowning in images.

The result? A wave of artists using Los Angeles as their laboratory. Pop. Conceptualism. Hard-edge abstraction. Local artists and outsiders alike leaned into the freedom of the city and pushed modern art in directions nobody quite expected.

Los Angeles didn’t just join the conversation. For a while there, it rewrote the rules.