The colorfully painted hippie van remains as identifiable a Bay Area symbol as the Golden Gate Bridge more than 60 years after the Age of Aquarius.
Now that countercultural image is being revived as the rolling ambassador for the first Further Triennial, a three-month visual arts celebration that will bring together more than 80 nonprofit organizations across Northern California in 2027.
An electric-converted 1979 Volkswagen Westfalia, christened “Furthermore,” will be transformed into a mobile work of art by Mission School artist Alicia McCarthy, painted in one of her signature, multicolor weave motifs. During the triennial’s Spotlight Saturdays, the van will travel among partner locations, serving as both a roving hub and, as McCarthy noted, as a “little bit of like a tinkerbell” signal that the Bay Area’s latest regional art experiment has arrived.
The van’s name and purpose are an homage to perhaps the most famous of all the groovy vehicles of the 1960s, the psychedelic school bus dubbed “Further.” It carried “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” author Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters across the country and through the Bay Area during their LSD-influenced counterculture movement, immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 nonfiction bestseller, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”…