State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970, is an investigation of the development of conceptual and related avant-garde activities among artists living in California in the late 1960s and early 70s. State of Mind identifies and investigates the West Coast art world’s significant contribution to Conceptual art, video, performance, and installation. This exhibition features approximately 150 works by 60 artists in a range of media including video, film, photography, installation, drawing and painting as well as performance documentation and ephemera. State of Mind is one of the three anchor exhibitions that helped chart the course of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, the ambitious collaborative initiative of the Getty with arts institutions across southern California, celebrating the birth of the L.A. art scene.

Featuring approximately 150 works by 60 artists, State of Mind explores the growth of Conceptualism and the exploration of new methodologies, technologies and sites for artistic expression in California in response to immense social change. In 1970s California, the effects of a youth oriented counter-culture, the Civil Rights Movement, the Chicano students’ protest against racism and inequality, and the Vietnam War strongly influenced the artists in this exhibition. Californian artists began freely experimenting and upending traditional forms of art in search of mediums more suitable to the concerns of the moment. Artists moved out of museums and galleries and into the streets as a form of institutional critique and aspired to create a community that fostered an exchange of radical forms and ideas.

State of Mind focuses on Conceptualism’s examination of public and private space through installations, a relatively unexplored area of study, and also juxtaposes the practice of Northern and Southern Californian artists. The exhibition centers on ten themes: the Street, the Environment, Politics, Feminism, Domestic Space, Public Space, Perceptual and Psychological Space, the Body and Performance, Art about Art, Artists’ Books, and Ephemera. The exhibition showcases Conceptualism’s use of ideas, language, and systems of meaning as showcased through video, film, photography, installation, artist books, drawing, and paintings as well as extensive performance documentation and ephemera. The artists featured include a range of major international figures to lesser-known artists who nonetheless made important contributions.

Curated by Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss; Co-organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. The exhibition tour is organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York.