Back in the ’60s, my mother had an older co-worker named Aida whose nephew was Chet Helms, a San Francisco free spirit whose Family Dog Productions included Denver’s Family Dog concert hall for a couple of explosive years. It was through Aida that my brother and I came to possess a small collection of classic Family Dog posters and handbills. I was the envy that year of Merrill Junior High’s burgeoning hippie contingent, or at least the few of them who got to look inside my locker.
Nowadays, those very graphics, indicative as they are of the whole countercultural milieu of that era, have traveled far from the inside of an eighth-grader’s locker: Instead, they hang in museums, including the Denver Art Museum, where The Psychedelic Experience: Rock Posters From the San Francisco Bay Area, 1965-1971 opens today, featuring 300 works from its newly acquired poster collection that both symbolize and transcend the pop-culture bubble that produced them .
Exhibit curator Darrin Alfred says a museum is exactly where such works belong: “The skill and imagination behind these images transcends mere communication to become artistry,” he says. “Sinuous, distorted letterforms are not unlike those of the Art Nouveau movement at the turn of the century, and this lineage of contemporary type treatment can be traced to the Dada, Constructivist and Futurist traditions of the 1920s, which recognized that type functions visually as well as verbally — as both communication device and design element.”
Admission to the exhibit, which includes access to the rest of the museum, ranges from $7 to $15 (members and children under six will be admitted free); for more information, visit www.denverartmuseum.org or call 720-865-5000. The Psychedelic Experience ends July 26.
Tuesdays-Sundays. Starts: March 21. Continues through July 26, 2009
