PORTLAND, OR.- Vibrant, surreal, and playful, the rock concert posters from 1960s San Francisco capture the energy and excitement of both the music and the era. Opening October 19 at the Portland Art Museum, Psychedelic Rock Posters and Fashion of the 1960s reveals the passion and creativity of this moment.

Music promoters Chet Helms and Bill Graham recruited talented young artists from San Francisco to make distinctive posters for their music venues, the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium, respectively. To portray the heady experience of life and music at this time, poster artists invented a graphic language to communicate the excitement of rock concerts, which also featured liquid light shows and film projections. They drew on disparate historical precedents, such as French Art Nouveau designs, Wild West posters, Victorian engravings, and Renaissance art, and combined them with witty and provocative design. While deploying distortion, pattern, and surrealism, they juxtaposed heterogeneous objects to mimic the “psychedelic experience,” in which participants sought to access a realm of thinking beyond the visual world, typically through the use of LSD.

Pulsating color combinations played a key role as well. Artist Victor Moscoso, who trained under renowned color theorist Josef Albers at Yale University, made this analogy: “The musicians were turning up their amplifiers to the point where they were blowing out your eardrums. I did the equivalent with the eyeballs.” Inventive lettering is another hallmark of this style. Originally inspired by Viennese posters circa 1900, artist Wes Wilson developed a new typographic language that defined the moment. Other artists adopted and improvised on Wilson’s style, forming a dynamic and nearly illegible script that nonetheless spoke directly to their intended audience.

The exhibition brings together nearly 200 rock posters, including work by the “big five” designers of the day—Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, and Wes Wilson—as well as other superb talents, such as Bonnie MacLean, Jim Blashfield, and Bob “Raphael” Schnepf. A few of the artists were highly trained, while others were entirely self-taught. All were young, tuned-in, and innovative. Their designs range from the playful to the profound and continue to speak to audiences today. In addition to the posters, the installation showcases 20 eclectic vintage styles, including buckskin fringe, velveteen, and silk, to demonstrate how fashion both reflected and influenced the psychedelic look of the posters.

“There are so many ways to explore this material,” says exhibition curator Mary Weaver Chapin, PAM’s Curator of Prints and Drawings. “We’re taking a design approach, asking how these artists developed a style that was immediately recognizable, spoke to the right audience, and looked entirely new while simultaneously borrowing heavily from other artistic and cultural signifiers.”

Portland was not left out of this creative flowering; many bands came here and to Eugene en route to Seattle, sparking a psychedelic poster explosion in our hometown. A special gallery will be devoted to Portland venues, including Beaver Hall, Pythian Hall, Springer’s Ballroom, and, significantly, the Masonic Temple, now part of the Museum campus. To round out the Portland gallery, local fashion designer Adam Arnold will contribute custom cushion designs inspired by the art.

The exhibition was initiated by the generous gift of Gary Westford to the Portland Art Museum. Major donations of poster art in 2019 and 2023 form the backbone of the exhibition, while key loans round out the visual story of the psychedelic era. Westford serves as a consultant to this project.

Whether you come to the exhibition to reminisce about your own 1960s experience or encounter these mind-blowing designs for the first time, Psychedelic Rock Posters and Fashion of the 1960s is sure to inspire.

The exhibition is curated by Mary Weaver Chapin, Ph.D., Curator of Prints and Drawings.