Private Screening: “San Francisco’s Big Five and the Psychedelic Poster Revolution”
Friday, Nov. 6, 6 pm | Free
215 Haight Street, San Francisco
Big Five Pictures will be screening a pre-release version of their upcoming 93-minute documentary “San Francisco’s Big Five and the Psychedelic Poster Revolution” at the Haight Street Art Center, 215 Haight Street, on Friday November 6 at 6pm. The free screening (no tickets are necessary) will take place upstairs—first-come, first-seated. Filmmakers Ted Bahr and Jesse Block will be present. The screening occurs the night before the annual TRPS Festival of Rock Posters at the Hall of Flowers in Golden Gate Park on Saturday November 7. Visitors in town for TRPS will also be able to enjoy HSAC’s newest exhibition, “The Art of Metallica.”
About the Film:
The psychedelic poster movement that emerged in San Francisco between 1966 and 1969 was one of the most original and influential art movements of the twentieth century. At its center were five remarkable artists—Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, and Rick Griffin—who came to be known as the Big Five. Working independently and sometimes collaboratively, they transformed the humble concert poster into a new form of visual expression. Their posters announced the legendary dances at the Fillmore, Avalon Ballroom, and other San Francisco venues, but soon became much more than advertising. They became collectible works of art and the visual embodiment of The Summer of Love generation.
Narrated by Ben Fong-Torres, the film follows this explosion of creativity from the early San Francisco dance-hall scene through the Summer of Love and into 1968 and 1969, when the movement and the Haight-Ashbury dream began to unravel. Along the way, it introduces the larger community of artists who expanded the visual vocabulary of the movement, including Bonnie MacLean, Lee Conklin, David Singer, Randy Tuten, and others. At the center is the “Joint Show” of July 1967, when the Big Five exhibited their work at the Moore Gallery in what became an important moment in the recognition of psychedelic posters as fine art.