Art and the Counterculture have always been inextricably linked, from the Berkeley Free Press to the Black Panther newspaper to Pop Art. It’s widely acknowledged that the history of Californian art didn’t start until 1961, it’s catalyst being Andy Warhol’s first West Coast show at the seminal Los Angeles Ferus Gallery. From Pop Art to Feminist Art and radical Black art, LA became a hotbed of artistic revolutionary fervour.

Warhol's Ferus show was attended by a young Hollywood actor named Dennis Hopper, who had recently begun to turn his hand to photography. Hopper would go on to capture many of the civil rights and counterculture’s most important events on film. He would also become good friends with a number of the 60s most pioneering and influential artists including Ed Rusha and Warhol. Around the same time, around 900 miles due west, in Taos New Mexico, a new artistic movement was happening. For decades the small remote town of Taos, had attracted outsiders and artists seeking refuge amid the sage, aspen trees and cosmic energy: DH Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Georgia O’Keefe all spent time there, the radical Transcendental Painting Group manifested there and even Carl Jung visited Taos in 1925.

Not unsurprisingly, Taos became a particularly potent magnet for counterculture communitarians during the late 1960s. After defining the Counterculture with his hit movie Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper bought a 22-room adobe house there in 1970 and soon filled it with a shifting subcultural cast of hippies, artists and drifters. He wrestled with the footage of The Last Movie there, his ill-starred directorial follow up to Easy Rider, screening snippets in the old Taos movie theatre, El Cortez, which he later bought and turned into his home and art studio. Taos and its native culture exerted a lifelong hold on Hopper and it was where he chose to be buried in 2010. To this day Taos still exerts a mystical, healing energy - even beyond the mysterious low frequency phenomena known as the “Taos Hum” - it remains a catalyst for artist, musicians and writers, an otherworldly meeting point 2000m above sea level in the New Mexico wilderness.