The Artists
The Psychedelic Experience includes 300 posters—as well as album covers, underground newspapers, and other items—by more than 50 artists, including the psychedelic poster movement’s major contributors.
Wes Wilson had little academic training but got his start printing handbills and posters at a San Francisco printing press.
The first artist to consistently create posters for the Avalon and Fillmore, Wilson initially produced as many as six posters a month for the two venues. His designs set the style, capturing the full sensory experience of the dancehall environment and the visual distortions brought on by psychedelic drugs. Veering away from clear, utterly readable design, Wilson hand-lettered his posters to create three-dimensional, undulating shapes. "I like to do my work freehand—no ruler and stuff. Just make it fit naturally." After about 1966, Wilson began to incorporate nude women into his designs—which, at the time, was a bold step in representing the sexually open, liberated hippie lifestyle.
Bonnie MacLean helped her husband, Bill Graham, with just about everything involved in operating San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium, from blowing up balloons to counting money.
She also designed the upcoming events chalkboard in the Fillmore lobby. “The blackboards gave me the idea she could do posters,” Graham said, “and when [Wes Wilson] left, Bonnie took over.” Using Wilson’s style as inspiration, MacLean played with lettering and often focused her design on the facial expressions of detached-looking figures.
One of the founding members of the Family Dog commune, Alton Kelley began by drawing posters and handbills for the group’s dances. Stanley “Mouse” Miller developed his graphic style in Detroit, where he designed hot rod graphics.
The pair came together to form Mouse Studios, with Kelley imagining themes and finding photographs and Mouse drawing and lettering. They started out designing a new poster every week for the Avalon, and by the end of their first year they had also produced 26 posters for the Fillmore. At their studio, a converted firehouse where Janis Joplin rehearsed with Big Brother and the Holding Company, Mouse and Kelley hosted poster-making “jams” where groups of artists worked side by side.
While a student at Yale University, Victor Moscoso studied color theory under artist Josef Albers. As a professional graphic designer, he turned Albers’s theories of color interaction on their head.
With his vibrating color combinations and lettering pushed to the point of illegibility, Moscoso’s posters broke many time-honored graphic design traditions. Moscoso soon realized that promoters like Chet Helms and Bill Graham were printing and selling thousands of posters every month through national and international distributors. In 1966, Moscoso set up his own poster production company, the Neon Rose, which allowed him to retain the rights to his own designs.
Originally from Southern California, Rick Griffin started out creating comics for Surfer Magazine about a character named "Murph the Surf."
When a friend showed him some of the Haight’s psychedelic posters, Griffin decided to move to San Francisco to see what he could add to the scene. Old Western imagery, bold color combinations, and highly decorative lettering became his trademarks. As he saw it, the lettering was “a piece of art in itself.” A tortured perfectionist, Griffin often reworked his drawings numerous times before he was satisfied.
With no formal training but formidable drawing skills, Lee Conklin composed his posters in overnight sessions during which he crammed forms into almost every single letter and figure.
Conklin’s style was a perfect match for the Fillmore’s demographic. His alternate realities and occasionally dark images reflected changes occurring in the counterculture community as young people swarmed the Haight and hard drug use skyrocketed. His objects are rarely what they first appear to be. What begins as the letter D might, upon inspection, morph into a bird . . . then two birds . . . and end up as a face.
When David Singer walked into the Fillmore’s office, promoter Bill Graham had been looking for an artist who could take his posters in a new direction.
Singer’s creations stemmed from his interest in collage: he borrowed images from printed material and combined them into works he called “visual poems.” Singer’s restrained style avoided the vibrant color, decorative lettering, and dense patterns that defined earlier psychedelic posters. He designated clear borders around the collaged images for text. Singer designed more posters for the Fillmore than any other artist, creating 67 examples between 1969 and 1971, the venue’s last two years of operation.
