Photo by: www.denverartmuseum.org
Take a trip back to the 1960s and experience the social revolution that brought about free love and rock music in an exhibit at the Denver Art Museum.
Titled “The Psychedelic Experience: Rock Posters from the San Francisco Bay Area, 1965-71” is a multi-media exhibit that runs through July 19.
Although posters depicting the counterculture of the 1960s are the prime focus of the exhibit, it also includes album covers, underground newspapers, comics, a liquid light show video and music. Visitors are encouraged to experience the experimental culture in the Psychedelic Side Trip, which is an interactive addition to the exhibit housed in the adjacent Martin & McCormick Gallery.
Enter the Psychedelic Side Trip to sounds of Jimi Hendrix being played, walls saturated with peace signs, a mock 1960s living room with a video about the era playing and even make your own modern psychedelic poster with supplied materials.
The poster art heralded the advent of rock groups that separated themselves from rock and roll played live and often improvised concerts that made up the San Francisco Sound in the 1960s. This influenced the counterculture phenomenon of freethinking and psychedelics for the adolescents of the time.
As dance concerts at the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium gained popularity, so did posters promoting the concerts.
The posters served as advertisement for the bands, psychedelic provocateurs, appealed to aficionados and offended everyone else.
The exhibition takes viewers through the early development of poster making that first used the sensory overload experienced at dance concerts to its later progression towards surreal design.
Approximately 300 visually stunning posters are on display in The Psychedelic Experience, and the artists’ techniques as well as the influences that shaped their work are explored.
Wes Wilson, the first to create posters consistently for the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium, is one of the founding fathers of the psychedelic poster phenomenon. He produced his own type of lettering style that was more about filling the space to create undulating, three-dimensional patterns than being legible. This style became a standard for later poster-makers.
Wilson’s works emulate the visual distortions brought on by light shows and psychedelic drugs at dance shows. Currently on display are posters he made to advertise bands like Association and Quicksilver Messenger Service.
Bonnie MacLean helped her husband, Bill Graham, operate the Fillmore, and her designs on an ‘upcoming events’ chalkboard helped develop her poster-making style. She was the only woman artist to receive steady commissions and her poster for the Yardbirds and the Doors at the Fillmore Auditorium along with others is on display. Although she drew from Wilson’s technique, she experimented with cultural diversity and often depicted detached-looking figures. Like most poster artists, she utilized electric colors.
Most poster artists of the time were not trained in the craft. However, one of the firsts was Victor Moscoso, who studied color theory at Yale University. He accidently discovered that by alternating colored lights on an image certain colors would appear then disappear and used this on posters to create the illusion of movement. Three such posters are included in the exhibit and make for a truly trippy experience. Other Moscoso works not illuminated by flashing colorful lights are also on display.
Artist Lee Conklin’s work marks a shift in the counterculture with his use of alternate realities and dark undertones. A letter appearing on one of Conklin’s poster might first appear to be just that but look closer and it turns into a bird then that morphs into two birds and with a closer look that may end up being a face. Objects in Conklin’s works are rarely what they appear to be. Some of his posters on display were made for bands like Steppenwolf and the Grateful Dead.
After the shock value of illegible letters and undulating designs wore off, artists like David Singer began creating posters entirely of photographic materials, made in a collage style and with legible lettering. Singer made more posters for the Fillmore than any other artists and many of his posters are on display in The Psychedelic Experience.
Whether this era is a blast from the past or your first encounter with the culture, “The Psychedelic Experience” is sure to be a trip.
