Glitter & Trash: Glam Rock Roots & Revolutions

Opens March 27, 2025

Opening party on March 28^th from 6-10 pm featuring DJ Little Hiss Muffet, and costume party with prizes. Co-hosted with Amoeba Music.

The Haight Street Art Center is pleased to present Glitter & Trash: Glam Rock, Roots & Revolutions, running from March 27 through May 25, 2025. Curated by Peter Groff of Bucknell University, with the majority of the 100-plus pieces in the exhibition lent by author Andrew Krivine, the exhibition explores the aesthetics of Glam Rock, a musical movement that had its heyday in the early- to mid-1970s. In addition to showing the genre’s roots, the exhibition also touches on the musical revolutions it spurred—Punk, Goth, and New Romanticism.

Deriving from the word ‘glamour’ (originally: magic, enchantment, the casting of a spell), Glam rejected the 1960s’ cherished values of authenticity, realism, and naturalness, embracing in its stead artifice, theatricality, and the creation of fantastic spectacles. Glam’s vision was simultaneously retro and futuristic. It drew upon a variety of historical inspirations—the flamboyant showmanship of 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, the irresistible schmaltz of Broadway musicals, the mesmerizing star power of Hollywood’s golden age, the dark, seductive demi-monde of the decadents—and dressed them all up in glitter, platform boots, and outlandish space-age regalia.

Glam was profoundly influenced by the gay counterculture of its own time as well (especially the campy, absurdist, and self-parodic forms of experimental theater emerging from its drag scenes). It became the first movement in pop music to experiment with gender-bending and embrace a spectrum of sexual orientations.

Glitter & Trash conceives of Glam in a broad and inclusive spirit: pieces range from the arty, androgynous theatrics of David Bowie, to the bubblegum pleasures of The Sweet, the shock rock of Alice Cooper, the sleazy nihilism of Lou Reed, and the freaky Afrofuturist funk of Parliament. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes playful, sometimes surreal, sometimes disturbing, Glam created an aesthetic template that musical artists and fashion designers still draw from in their attempts to forge new forms of human self-expression and liberation.

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