Learning by Doing at the Farm: Craft, Science, and Counterculture in Modern California

Edited by Robert J. Kett and Anna Kryczka

Beginning in 1968, the University of California, Irvine, was host to an experiment in intercultural exchange and artistic and social scientific learning through practice. Located on the edges of William Pereira’s California Brutalist campus, the Farm was a space for craftspeople from Guatemala, Mexico, and Samoa to demonstrate their skills; a laboratory for new methods in education and research; and an unexpected countercultural gathering site.

Learning by Doing at the Farm reflects upon this unusual experiment, which brought together Cold War politics, modern development, and indigenous peoples drawn into the strange intellectual and cultural circumstances of 1960s California. Through a critical introduction and previously unpublished archival documentation, this book offers a glimpse of various actors’ dreams of what the Farm could become and the collaborations that actually unfolded there.

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Robert Kett is currently a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. His dissertation connects histories of archaeology, oil geology, biological sciences, and Pan-American art in twentieth-century southern Mexico to consider their collective role in the constitution of natural/cultural resources and the region itself.

Anna Kryczka holds an MA in art history, theory, and criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently a doctoral candidate in visual studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation examines how Cold War taste cultures shaped and were shaped by sixties discourse around domesticity, expertise, and national belonging.