Flash back to the Summer of Love
De Young Museum exhibit relives music, art, fashion of era
The party atmosphere begins even before visi-tors walk in the door. At the entry court of San Francisco's de Young Museum, the windows are punctuated with colorful blown-up images of buttons from the 1960s: "Flower Power." "Love Is a Four Letter Word" and "Give Earth a Chance." Plus a hint at the Vietnam War-era's politics, "Out Now."
"The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fash-ion and Rock & Roll" is the de Young's survey of the most visual elements of the counterculture, marking the 50th anniversary of that almost mythical celebration in San Francisco. And the museum is certainly the appropriate setting: The rock music concerts, the protests, hippie gatherings, the artists and bohemian fash-ion parades took place practically on its doorstep in Golden Gate Park and the adjacent Hthght-Ashbury neighborhood.
The exhibit, which runs April 8 through Aug. 2, draws primarily on the clothing — costumes, re-ally — and rock concert posters in the collection of the museum and the Achenbach Foundation of Graphic Art located at the de Young's sister mu-seum. the Leffion of Honor.
Though best known for displays of artists like Rembrandt and Picasso, the collection also includes hundreds of psychedelic concert posters, in pristine condition, by artists like Wes Wilson and Stanley Mouse. (Among them is nearly every poster from concerts at the legendary Avalon Ballroom.)
Beyond the posters, costumes, photographs and commentary on social and political change, the Summer of Love "experience" is provided by lively, immersive visuals. The first is triple-exposed concert film footage from the Trips Festival held at Longshoreman's Hall near Fisherman's Wharf in 1966. The images are projected on two curving screens that act like giant parentheses for visitors to walk between near the beginning of the exhibit. If the Trips Festival pointed the way to the Summer of Love a year later, it’s no wonder: Involved were Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Jefferson Airplane, writer Ken Kesey and concert promoter Bill Graham.
The other visual experience is a 1960s-style light show commissioned by the de Young and created by Bill Ham, who was making the same kind of magic half a century ago at the Avalon Ballroom. This “kinetic light painting” is a dizzying mix of swirling, bubbling colors, projected on four walls of a big walk-through room in one of the largest galleries.
Another walk-through experience is a re-created poster shop, where brightly colored, densely patterned posters are transformed into wallpaper covering ev-
ery inch of the space. Of the 400 works in “The Summer of Love,” 200 seem to be posters. No matter how creative the individual designs, en masse they become a psychedelic blur. Maybe that’s the idea.
The work of poster artists gets a closer look in the next gallery. Flashing black lights reveal the animation in Victor Moscoso’s designs promoting concerts and poetry readings. Nearby, color separations for artists’ intricate designs offer a fascinating window into the creation of their posters, many of which ended up as handouts or stapled to utility poles.
Other counterculture art moved with the body. On display are dresses with silhouettes that recall Victorian styles, but are hand painted with pastoral or mystical images. One outfit features a repeated peace symbol. Mannequins are clustered throughout the exhibit, dressed in both handmade and manufactured styles. Denim jackets get radical makeovers with appliqués and buttons.
The continual juxtaposition of the period clothes and posters reflects the work of the exhibit organizers, Jill D’Alessandro, the Fine Arts Museums’ curator of textile and costume art; and Colleen Terry, assistant curator at the Achenbach Foundation.
One artist — the vegan shoemaker Mickey McGowan, who was known as the “apple cobbler” — crafted boots with rubber soles out of colorful pieced fabric, instead of leather. Among his raw materials were playing cards and Boy Scout uniforms.
A real treasure in the exhibit is Jerry Garcia’s “Captain Trips” hat, a top-hat from the 1850s updated with red and white stripes, with a tiny American flag stuck in the hatband. As the curators point out, it’s “the quintessential object of the counterculture’s patriotic spirit that was both ironic and hopeful.” The social and political changes — not to mention the neighborhood transformation — are not overlooked. Oversize black-and-white photographs line the exhibit entrance and form a kind of historic mural for a step back in time, through the Haight-Ashbury and on to Golden Gate Park’s “Hippie Hill.” An estimated 100,000 people journeyed to San Francisco in 1967, eager to connect with, or at least take a look at, ground zero of the counterculture. Gray Line tour buses rolled along Haight Street. At one point, the street was so congested that it was reconfigured for one-way traffic. The words of Dan Kiely, a police captain at nearby Park Station, are posted to set the stage for what some saw as an “invasion”: “They somehow got the idea that there would be free love, free pot, free food and a free place to sleep.” “What are we fighting for?” asks one posting in the final gallery, focusing on the legacy of the Summer of Love. Civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights and environmental action were among the causes that percolated in that era. Above all were protests against the Vietnam War, briefly but pointedly noted in the exhibit. Among the posters is one from 1968 showing Joan Baez and her sisters Pauline and Mimi sitting on a loveseat, photographed by Jim Marshall. The subject is actually resistance to the military draft. The text reads, “Girls say yes to boys who say NO.”