Our cabin sits on part of that land. We didn't write this history, but we fell in love with the idea behind it and with the people who tried it. We hope guests feel some of the magic of this place.
An overview
Art Park was founded in 1970 by the sculptor David Hostetler along with Vernon Allen, George Kokis and David Klahn — Ohio University artists who bought forty acres outside Athens as an open-air workshop for students. They chose ground that had been strip-mined, which was the whole point: an argument about what people do to the land they use up. Their symbol was a phoenix.
It didn't last. Their first festival was scheduled for late May 1970 and collided with the aftermath of Kent State, which closed Ohio University days before the gates opened. Within a year the county had cited the site over sanitation, and the founders had no appetite for turning a woodland studio into a permitted attraction. Work moved back to campus.
Local legend has it the Grateful Dead turned up and played on the property that summer. We've never been able to document it — the band's confirmed Athens show was a free one at Memorial Auditorium in 1968 — but the story has outlived nearly everyone who could settle it, and around here people still tell it.
Tyler Buchanan told the full story for The Athens Messenger in 2015, and it's worth reading in his words rather than ours.
David Hostetler
Hostetler earned his MFA at Ohio University in 1949 and taught there for nearly four decades. He was a direct carver — a log, a bench, a mallet, and hours of work one stroke at a time. His American Woman series brought him national recognition, his work is held in more than twenty-five museums, and he played drums in the Athens jazz scene well into his later years. He died in 2015 at eighty-eight, and would have turned one hundred this year.
What's here now
Little of Art Park survived. It was never built to last, and the woods took back most of it. What remains is the land — recovering, quiet, still ringed by hundreds of undeveloped acres.
We renovated the cabin and kept the name. Guests hike the same hillsides, past the boulder formations and the pond, under the same sky. Fifty years of forest have grown over the strip mine. In its way the phoenix held up.