Haight Street Art Center is pleased to announce with Mayor Daniel Lurie and Grahame Lesh, Forever Grateful/Golden Gate Park, the second of two landmark Grateful Dead exhibitions, opens September 5, 2026, at San Francisco County Fair Building (Hall of Flowers) in Golden Gate Park. Where the first exhibition invites contemplation, Forever Grateful/Golden Gate Park invites participation. Visitors wind through an immersive environment anchored by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' Furthur bus and Jerry Garcia's BMW, encountering performers, large-scale projections, artwork, ephemera, puppetry, hands-on experiences, and community storytelling installations—a place to share, listen, and leave their own mark.

At Forever Grateful/Golden Gate Park, Haight Street Art Center is partnering with Third Rail Projects, one of the world's foremost creators of site-specific, immersive, and experiential performance. Together with a team of local artists, Third Rail Projects creates unexpected pockets of psychedelic, performance-driven experiences throughout the exhibition.

During their journey through the exhibition, visitors encounter experiential offerings that encourage conversation, reflection, and sharing. One of these, for example, invites visitors to participate in a collective, tactile craft that serves as a gateway into a moment of immersive performance, where small groups are welcomed into a surreal, lushly designed environment and find themselves within a shifting, dreamlike scene—a fusion of dance, immersive performance, and installation art.

Alongside these intimate encounters, performance bubbles up in moments of heightened spectacle. Roughly every hour, a burst of performance erupts into the exhibition. Mobile artworks and choreographed movement draw inspiration from the frenetic energy, themed floats, puppets, and unexpected visual surprises that occasionally appeared at Grateful Dead concerts, conjuring the same mind-bending sense of wonder and delight.

The first exhibition Forever Grateful, opened July 3, 2026, at Haight Street Art Center and spans both floors of the Center. The collection-driven exhibition, among the most comprehensive presentations of Grateful Dead visual culture ever assembled, brings together more than 400 works — paintings, original lithographs, pen and ink drawings, photographs, vinyl records, instruments, and rare ephemera — chronicling the band's journey from 1965 to 1995.

Combined, the exhibitions offer the Bay Area — and visitors from around the world — two distinct and complementary ways of experiencing the music, the art, and the community the Grateful Dead made possible.

Forever Grateful is on view at Haight Street Art Center beginning July 3, 2026. Forever Grateful/FFGolden Gate Park runs September 5 – October 25, 2026, at San Francisco County Fair Building (Hall of Flowers), Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.

Thank you to our sponsors, Amoeba Music San Francisco and Love on Haight!

San Francisco County Fair Building
1199 9th Ave, San Francisco, CA 94122