Poster art finally takes center stage
Famous graphic artist Stanley Mouse walked past the giant bronze rabbit at the entrance to the new Haight Street Art Center with a poster under his arm for inspiration.
He came to this full-service facility in the old UC Extension to reimagine his famous design for “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In” into the first poster to be created and exhibited here. Mouse uncluttered the image of a bearded Hindu with a third eye, gave it a new title, “The Art of Consciousness,” and updated it from Jan. 14, 1967, to July to September 2017.
Then it was to be handpulled through a silkscreen
printer on heavy art paper, signed by Mouse and stamped with the red Haight Street Art Center logo. On Saturday, July 1, a limited edition will be released to announce the grand opening of both the exhibit “The Art of Consciousness” and the free art center.
“This has been a long time coming — 50 years,” says Mouse, 76, who has come down from his Sebastopol studio to be a pioneer at this one-stop nonprofit dedicated to the rock poster and the dwindling supply of people who make them. Mouse will decide how many copies of “The Art of Consciousness” to print and sell and at what price, and he will get most of the proceeds.
“We finally have some control,” he says. “The opportunity is limitless for an artist, which has never happened before on this level.”
At 12,000 square feet on two levels, the center has a print shop with supply lockers for the artists and a museum and retail store for the public. A warren of galleries will display 90 posters from the breakthrough years of 1965-67 in the opening exhibit. All of the Big Five who made San Francisco the center of the genre will be represented: Mouse, Alton Kelly, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin and Wes Wilson.
“It’s a glorification of poster art,” says Roger McNamee, the Moonalice guitarist and poster philanthropist, who has put $1 million into remodeling the long-vacant space, and pledged another $1 million to keep it going.
Peter McQuaid, formerly the CEO of Grateful Dead Productions, is the executive director. He will run the place under McNamee, who fashions himself a Woodside hippie, with round-rimmed glasses, hair parted down the middle and a zip-up hoodie over a purple T-shirt.
“The whole purpose is to create a place that takes poster artists from being hopelessly disadvantaged to having economic advantages,” says McNamee, 61. He can afford to prop up the industry because “I was very lucky in my day job,” he says, during a tour of the facility. “I was a technology investor.”
He was also a poster investor. “The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion and Rock & Roll,” now at the de Young Museum, includes 26 posters on loan from McNamee, and he is still buying. When Moonalice started in 2007 as a ’60s-style San Francisco psychedelic roots band, one of the founding precepts was a freshly produced poster for every show.
“We figured we’d play 30 or 40 shows a year,” McNamee says, “and we’ve played 100 shows a year for 10 years.”
There are 986 Moonalice posters and counting. They paper the stairwell between the floors at the art center.
Back in the day of the Big Five, poster artists were paid maybe $500 for a poster plus a dozen copies. The promoter, or the band, got the copyright, which meant that if a design hit it big in the aftermarket, the income from all those concert posters sold in bookstores and record stores went to someone other than the artist.
The Moonalice business model is to pay the artist more up front, plus the artist keeps the copyright. There are some 35 artists in the Moonalice stable, and they will be the first to benefit from the art center’s platform.
“This is a chance for a poster artist to have a show without a gallery taking half the money,” Mouse says. “The percentage is artist-friendly.”
The economics work because the building is part of a Spanish Revival complex put up by the Works Progress Administration in 1934 as San Francisco State Teachers College. It sits on a huge lot, most of which has been developed into market-rate housing by Wood Partners.
This includes the original San Francisco State entrance on the southeast corner of Haight and Buchanan streets. The art center occupies the downslope annex, its midblock entrance marked by a sculpture by Jeremy Fish.
The entry is on the gallery level, with the print shop above it fully outfitted with scanners, printers and racks of paper. At Saturday’s opening, artists will be at work demonstrating the silk screen process, and visitors will be able to walk out with a freshly inked poster.
“This is like a living history museum on top of a museum,” says McQuaid, 68, who will oversee a staff of four. “We want to return to the craftsmanship where the artists print the work themselves.”
In discussing the concept, McNamee is prone to slipping into presentation mode, as if he is standing before a group of venture capitalists, with a whiteboard and a pointer. He begins every answer with “the way to think about this is ...”
He sees HSAC as a self-governing utopia, but there is not, as of yet, any governing committee in place. Artists will need to chip in for supplies and maintenance.
“The way to think about this is Peter made sure the building was here, I made sure the foundation was here,” McNamee says. “That’s the limit of our involvement. The collective will make all of the decisions.”