"A pleasure... The curators have written short, elucidating comments for almost everything here, about 150 items. Not only do their words bring individual images to life; but they also add up to an absorbing narrative of a place and an era." -- Holland Cotter New York Times "Provocative... Puts pressure on the category of idea-based art through a focus on the body, ritual, media and the social world." -- Gillian Young Art in America "While showing a real breadth, and the consistency of various sorts of conceptual thinking, [State of Mind is] in fact very useful in terms of ways in which an artist could reinvent their congenial mediums to express social, political, as well as artistic concerns." -- Phong Bui The Brooklyn Rail "Will leave [locals] ... wondering how they failed to notice so much provocative activity - a lot of it very public - when it occurred." San Francisco Chronicle "Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss take advantage of [the] outsider position, making use of art's ability to conjure or invent new meanings and contexts." -- Maika Pollack Gallerist NY "Makes for conceptual art's continued influence on contemporary art." Public Art Review "Informative and well written." Orange County Register
—Moira Roth, editor and contributor, The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 1970-1980
"State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 is an essential overview of the rich and complex moment when California assumed its role as a leading center for the making and exhibition of the kind of adventurous and progressive art that immediately fascinated the world, and over the years has come to define a generation and a region. An unmatched source of hard-to-find primary images combined with thought-provoking critical essays, this book can easily function as a standard text on this subject.”
—David Ross, former director of SFMOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and currently Chairman of the MFA program in Art Practice at The School of Visual Arts