Art & Architecture Festival

September 10-14, 2025

Peace Rises
 

BuildFest 2 asks candidates to submit designs for timber “Peace-Infrastructure,” which will be installed at various locations on the historic grounds of the 1969 Woodstock festival located at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.

Bethel Woods Art and Architecture Festival 2025: Build Fest 2 – Peace Rises will bring together faculty and student teams from universities across the United States to construct interactive wooden art installations on the historic grounds of the 1969 Woodstock festival. Over the course of five days, participants will live and work on site—where legendary performances by Jimi Hendrix and Joan Baez once took place—spending their days fabricating, assembling, and installing large-scale works, and their evenings immersed in cultural programming including concerts, exhibitions, and pop-up events. The public opening of the installations will take place on Sunday, September 14, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET, inviting visitors to explore the completed works in the landscape where music and counterculture once reshaped a generation.

2024 Curatorial Statement: Fire, humanity’s first technology, was delivered to us by Prometheus, stolen from the gods and given as both a gift and a burden. This act bestowed upon us the power to create (to cook food and to keep warm) but also the potential for destruction (to burn down, and destroy). From that mythic moment, we’ve been tasked with the responsibility to wield this power with care.

Today, as we stand on the threshold of new technological revolutions—artificial intelligence, autonomous construction, and beyond—we face a similar dilemma. While these innovations promise efficiency and progress, they also bear with them enormous responsibility. What are the consequences of these tools? Can they, like fire, be used to nurture community, enrich craft, and sustain our planet? Or, rather, will they hasten our demise.

Build Fest 2: Peace Rises looks to explore how emerging technologies can be embraced convivially, in service of human connection and ecological balance. It is an opportunity to question and reimagine a future where technology, like Prometheus’ fire, can be wielded for the collective good, mindful of both its power to spread peace and its potential to harm.

The 2025 Bethel Woods Art and Architecture Festival is made possible through the generous support of Think Wood, our Premier Sponsor. Major visionary support is provided by Andrew Jacobson, trustee at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Grimm Construction, a family-owned and operated general contractor based in Pennsylvania.  Additional support is provided by UNALAM and DeGraw & DeHaan Architects.