San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in the late 1960s was ground zero for the birth of the counterculture in America — manifesting the fashion, music and mindset that defined a generation. Experimental, socially conscious jam bands like Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape and, of course, the Grateful Dead provided the soundtrack to the dawning hippie revolution. It was at their concerts, in legendary Bay Area venues like the Fillmore West and the Avalon Ballroom, that thousands of young people from across the country first experimented with mind-altering substances like marijuana, LSD, mushrooms and peyote — opening their minds to the universe and losing themselves within the music.
So naturally, the advertisements for those shows had to be just as psychedelic. To meet that need, a new breed of underground artists emerged to create a new pop culture art form: the rock poster. Now the Portland Art Museum is revisiting the work of these incredible artists with a groovy new exhibit entitled “Psychedelic Rock Posters and Fashion of the 1960s.”
The exhibit features nearly 200 posters from around a dozen different artists, including the genre’s legendary “big five” — Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse and Wes Wilson. Most of these entheogen-inspired handbills feature vivid colors that vibrate when juxtaposed against one another, creating optical illusions of movement (especially when viewed while tripping), and wavy, hand-drawn lettering (inspired by turn-of-the-century European art) that is often nearly illegible — specifically designed that way to keep the “squares” away.
“The artists deliberately made them difficult to read, and I think part of that was so they could appeal to this subculture of folks who would stand there and stare at that poster as long as it took to figure it out,” notes the exhibit’s curator, Mary Weaver Chapin, Ph.D. “Not surprisingly, the people who commissioned the posters did not like that at all. In fact, there’s a famous exchange in which one of the producers, Bill Graham, says to his artist, Wes Wilson, ‘These are terrible — nobody can read them!’ And the artist replies, ‘Yeah, man, that’s the point!’”
The vast majority of the posters on display were donated to the museum by local artist Gary Westford, who began collecting them while attending San Francisco State College from 1968 to 1971. In addition to the art, the exhibit also features a selection of fashions from the era and a psychedelic light show by OG visual artist Bill Ham, who provided the visuals for many of the old “Family Dog” concerts at the Avalon that these posters were promoting.
If you’re in the area and feel like experiencing a far-out flashback, take a hit and head on down… We think you’ll really dig it.
“Psychedelic Rock Posters and Fashion of the 1960s” runs until June 25. For more info, visit portlandartmuseum.org.
