Walking back into the Summer of Love
The Summer of Love was time-capsuled by the artists who were in San Francisco in 1967. But how does it look to the artists who weren’t in the city?
To get the answer, the San Francisco Arts Commission assigned a series of six bus shelter poster designs to Deborah Aschheim, a ’60s-centric Los Angeles artist who was alive during the Summer of Love — just barely.
“I’m just the age where you missed everything and spent your whole life thinking about this mythological decade,” says Aschheim, who was born in 1964, and creates art based on “the intersection of memory and place.”
Her installation, “The Zeitgeist,” involves archival photographs from 1967 that she interpreted as pen-and-ink drawings. They include a Hells Angel showing off his colors at the Human Be-In on Jan. 14, a Vietnam War protest on April 15 and a Digger with his jacket pulled tight. Each drawing was printed in a set of six, for a total of 36 on the sidewalk between the Embarcadero and Eighth Street.
“I wanted to bring these ghosts back to life so as you are walking down Market Street, you are time traveling,” says the 52-year-old artist.
With a degree in anthropology from Brown University, Aschheim put what she learned to work while searching through the archives of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley and the GLBT Historical Society, and in the special collections at UC Santa Cruz. Aschheim looked at hundreds of pictures before picking out six images to draw.
But that was the easy part. The hard part was tracking down the photographers or their estates, 50 years later, to get permission from the owner of the copyright, which in some cases was not the photographer.
“I did a lot of detective work,” she says
Though the art is primarily black-and-white, there is a restrained use of color in each, just enough to bring the images to life and catch the eye of a passerby.
“At the time I was drawing these, I was thinking about how we live now with our focus on careers and material success,” Aschheim says by phone from Los Angeles, where she recently marched to protest President Trump’s immigration policies.
“Since the election, the values that people were fighting for in the ’60s have become more urgent,” she says. “These progressive gains are threatened.”
“The Zeitgeist” is up until May 12 as the first of three rotating Summer of Love shows in the ongoing Art on Market Street Poster Series. Aschheim will be followed by Sarah Hotchkiss’ interpretation of the cultural scene as covered by the underground press, and Kate Haug’s Summer of Love trading cards.
If the six posters by Aschheim are not enough Summer of Love, you can proceed directly from Market Street to the ground floor of City Hall for “Jim Marshall’s 1967,” an exhibition of 80 blown-up images by the king of all San Francisco rock ’n’ roll photographers.