Psychedelic Rock Posters and Fashion of the 1960s
Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR - To June 15
In the 1960s and 1970s, as the psychedelic rock ’n’ roll genre grew, a style of concert poster emerged in San Francisco that stands alone in the history of graphics. Psychedelic Rock Posters and Fashion of the 1960s plumbs the Portland Art Museum’s as well as some private collections to show how bubble writing and clashing colors came to promise a groovy night out in that era.
Many of the more than 200 posters and handbills in the exhibition feature concerts at the Avalon Ballroom or the Fillmore Auditorium. The artists accepted that, against the basic rules of graphic design, viewers had to study the poster to figure out what it said, making them insiders in a subculture. But many of the posters bear the name of legendary promoter Bill Graham in plain typeface. Graham always insisted his name be clear, even if the band names were indecipherable.
One poster, black with green lettering, reads “Jefferson Airplane and the Quicksilver Messenger Service.” The artist, Wes Wilson, makes the letters curve and take on a life of their own. Another of his posters, in white and orange, was for Andy Warhol and his multimedia event Plastic Inevitable. As Mary Weaver Chapin, PAM’s curator of prints and drawings, told Preview: “There was no contact at all [between visual and musical artists]. It was just another poster: artwork due on Monday, poster goes up on Thursday, you better be ready!”
Another poster, by Victor Moscoso, features a photo of a band walking toward the viewer, but the writing is an optical illusion in vibrating royal blue and pink. Moscoso studied under painter Josef Albers at Yale, where he learned color theory and how to subvert it .
As well as ’60s fashions on mannequins, a section on cowboy imagery, and pieces with black light paint, the show features a gallery devoted to psychedelic Portland. There are posters for shows at the Civic (Keller) Auditorium and the Portland Masonic Temple. The room includes a light projection and benches upholstered in groovy stripes and distorted checkerboard patterns by Portland fashion designer Adam Arnold.
The show includes familiar works such as the seminal Grateful Dead image of a skeleton festooned in roses. The artists, Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley, tore the etching from a library book in the San Francisco Public Library, colorized it and customized it. And a brand was born.
Curator and artist talk Feb 6, 1–2pm
Lecture by Professor Scott B. Montgomery Feb 16, 2–3:30pm
