A Brush with Jerry: Paintings, Watercolors, and Drawings by Jerome J. Garcia
Please join us for a special evening on September 12th from 6-9pm celebrating A Brush With Jerry: Paintings, Watercolors, and Drawings by Jerome J. Garcia. Wine provided by Silver Oak Cellars and Twomey Winery, Live Music, Goodie bags, Silent Auction, Limited Edition prints for sale, Limited Edition Herb Greene Portfolios for sale, and other exclusive merchandise. Thank you to our sponsors Silver Oak Cellars and Twomey Winery, Humboldt Family Farms, Haight Street Voice.
Tickets $70. Purchase tickets here. Free to Members. Become a Member today!
The Haight Street Art Center is extremely pleased to present a new exhibition titled A Brush with Jerry: Paintings, Watercolors, and Drawings by Jerome J. Garcia. The show will be opening on Jerry Garcia's birthday, August 1, and run through September 29, 2024. The Center will be open for extended hours until 8 PM on August 9th, the date of Garcia’s untimely death in 1995, to commemorate his life.
Known to most for his career as the lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia was an artist first, attending classes at what would become the San Francisco Art Institute while still in high school. Though he never stopped drawing, his music career naturally took precedence over his pursuits as a visual artist, but by the mid-1980s, Garcia began to make more time for fine art. A Brush with Jerry features more than 40 examples of the artist’s original work from that last decade of his life, as well as a pair of candid photos of Garcia at his easel. Together, this never-before-seen collection of original work by Jerry Garcia is a visual manifestation of his music—some pieces are dense and richly layered; others are simple and clean; and many express the sense of humor for which Garcia was so well known, as heard in the complex runs of notes and clever chord progressions that seemed to wink and grin at their listeners.
Among the exhibition’s highlights are a number of pieces that were subsequently produced as prints, including Wetlands I and Irish Tree. The show also includes one of the very few pieces referencing a song by the Grateful Dead—titled August West, this small drawing depicts the down-and-out character Garcia sings about in “Wharf Rat.” As one might expect from an artist with Garcia’s Haight-Ashbury background, the show naturally features numerous psychedelic pieces, but there are also a surprising number of formal landscapes and figurative works, from character studies to portraits to cartoons.