Far Out! New Museum at Bethel Woods Celebrates the ’60s

The Museum at Bethel Woods, designed by museum designer Gallagher & Associates and museum architect Westlake Reed Leskosky and making up the newest part of the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts in Bethel, N.Y., opened last month at the site of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair. The museum, designed to offer a multimedia understanding of the turbulent decade that reshaped America, offers 10,000 square feet of permanent display space, 6,000 square feet of changing exhibit gallery, a research and archive library, a 1,000-seat performance amphitheater, and a 4,500-square-foot events gallery. To understand the iconic significance of Woodstock, the architects say that the project will help younger visitors grasp the vital context of what was happening at the time “politically, militarily, and socially,” while enabling boomers to look back with some perspective. Emphasizing the project’s educational aspect, the museum plans to incorporate “programs that encourage social responsibility and explore how the important issues of the 1960s are relevant today, including ecological preservation, idealism and activism, diversity, and the evolution of popular music.” For a virtual tour, visit the museum’s Web site. (Photo © Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. For more photos, visit our photo gallery.)