Remembering the summer of love

THE EMERGENCE and flowering of psychedelic art coincided with one of the most revolutionary and tumultuous periods of the 20th century. Forty years after the legendary summer of 1967, an exhibition revisiting the Summer of Love traces the explosion of contemporary art and popular culture that was brought about by the civil unrest and pervasive social change of the 1960s and early 1970s. The exhibition celebrates a new psychedelic aesthetic that emerged in art, film, architecture, graphic design, fashion, and music, the latter highlighted by the Haight-Ashbury inspired sound of groups such as The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.

Psychedelic art, distinguished by its use of exuberant color, ornamental forms, and formally complex, obsessively detailed compositions, represented expanded or altered states of consciousness induced by music, light, meditation, and hallucinogenic drugs. In recent years, art of the psychedelic E era has experienced an unprecedented revival and captured the imaginations of contemporary artists, designers, and filmmakers. The exhibit reconstructs the original creative impulse and utopian ambitions of psychedelia and locates it within the wider cultural and political context of counterculture and the civil rights movement, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. The exhibition demonstrates how the psychedelic aesthetic permeated many aspects of popular culture and how artists, immersed in counter-cultural activity, fluidly crossed the boundaries between disciplines, genres, and media.

It features paintings, photographs, and sculptures by Isaac Abrams, Richard Avedon, Lynda Benglis, Richard Hendrix, Robert Indiana, Yayoi Kusama, Elliott Landy, Richard Lindner, John McCracken, and Andy Warhol, among others, as well as a rich selection of important posters, album covers, and underground magazines.

The art in the exhibition is contextualized through a wealth of documentary material; highlighting events, people, and places in three centers of counter-cultural activity: San Francisco, New York, and London. The sections include photographs, films of protests and concerts, light shows, as well as events at places such as the UFO nightclub in London, the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, and the Human Be-In in that city's Golden Gate Park, featuring Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary. The underground press, emerging during the 1960s as an instrument of alternative communication and democratization, is represented through Oz magazine, International Times, East Village Other, and The San Francisco Oracle, along with many other publications and documents. Providing a vivid picture of a period in fundamental moral and political upheaval, they also are testament to an extraordinary burst of creativity that revolutionized the visual vocabulary of graphic design.

"Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era" is on view through Sept. 16 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

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