Concrete Playground

Joni Mitchell best summed up Woodstock in her 1970 song of the same name:
“We are stardust/We are golden/And we’ve got to get ourselves/Back to the garden”.

Funny thing is, Joni didn’t even make it to the festival; she wrote the song on the strength of what she’d heard from Graham Nash. Woodstock is one of those universally entrenched cultural events that live on in the imagined memories of everyone who wasn’t there, partly because those who were can’t remember it.

This month, Blender Gallery adds to the legend with Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music, an exhibition of photos celebrating 40 years since the festival took place in upstate New York. Photographs from Elliott Landy, Amalie Rothschild, Burk Uzzle and Henry Diltz display, in full colour, the peace, love and freak flags flying high.