Overview

Follow the journey of artists Bruce Conner (iconic artist during the Beat, Psychedelic, and Punk periods) and his wife Jean (as reserved as her husband was assertive in seeking public attention), during the year they moved to Mexico City because Bruce believed they could “live cheaply and hide in the mountains when the bomb dropped.”

Bruce and some ex-pat friends (including Timothy Leary) would search for magic mushrooms and hidden Aztec pyramids while Jean stayed at home, recording aspects of the local culture. Their resulting drawings and the kaleidoscopic film Looking for Mushrooms Bruce made during their travels are topographic, psychedelic, religious and mundane. They give us a record of the young couple’s brief year of experimentation that ended with the birth of their son and their running out of money.

Find out how two young creative personalities, so different from each other, reacted to a cultural situation so radically foreign from their own in the first museum exhibition to concentrate on this formative time in their lives.