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Friday, June 21, 2002

By Mary Thomas, Post-Gazette Art Critic

Some of the most memorable pop-culture images created during the last, visually saturated century are the psychedelic posters designed to promote rock groups in the 1960s.

		'THE ART OF THE MUSIC POSTER FROM THE 60s AND 70s' Where: Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in Loretto, Saint Francis University. (Also showing is "Jazz Legends: The Photographs of Paula Ross.") When: Through Aug. 18. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. The exhibition will travel to the SAMA branches, beginning at Altoona in May of 2003. Admission: Free. 814-472-3920 or visit www.sama-sfc.org. Also: "Jamming at SAMA," a reception with live acoustic music by John Charney and an exhibition tour by Marchicelli, will begin at 5:30 p.m. Aug. 9. $15; $10 for members, reservations required.

With eye-popping color and lettering that challenged anyone not on a drug trip to decipher, they caught the mood of their time and of the performances they were touting.

This merging of "the persona of the performer and what the performance was about" was what gave such works their impact according to Graziella Marchicelli, curator of "The Art of the Music Poster from the 60s and 70s."

This complementary quality continues in the poster art of the 1970s, although by then pop music had "splintered into a multitude of styles" as varied as country, folk, disco and heavy metal.

The exhibition, at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in Loretto, comprises more than 100 posters, some of which were designed to be distributed with LPs, but most of which were commissioned by venues to advertise upcoming performances. Music by the performers represented -- including Jefferson Airplane, The Mamas and the Papas, Ike & Tina Tuner, The Rolling Stones and Elvis -- complements the exhibition.

Major players like San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom commissioned work by "visual artists who were a part of that counterculture" of the Bay area, Marchicelli says.

Their compositional innovations, such as "taking liberty with the letters," matched what was going on on stage, she says, where electric guitars pulsed with amplification and liquid light shows created flickering, moving atmosphere, "mimicking the experience of an acid trip."

In the late '70s, on the East Coast, CBGB's club in New York became famous for its local underground acts, some of which, like the Sex Pistols, would go on to cult status.

Marchicelli says that rock's "marriage" with the visual arts was one of the things that contributed to the strong revival of the visual arts in the '60s and '70s. "The evolution of the visual arts go hand in hand with the evolution of the music groups."

Among the exhibition's highlights, she says, are a Jimi Hendrix poster that's "so electric visually when you look at it that it's like Andy Warhol on acid -- vibrating with saturated colors. It so captures the energy that he had on stage." She also cites David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust alter-persona as "so beautiful" -- catching the "essence in his pose, the costume, the makeup, the hair," and the Look magazine commission of The Beatles in "bright, shifting psychedelic colors" by Richard Avedon in a style atypical for the noted photographer.

The posters, which have not been previously exhibited, are part of a larger collection of more than 400 offset lithographs and other paper ephemera given to the museum by collector Mark del Costello. Having catalogued a significant portion of the collection, Marchicelli felt it was time for an exhibition. She's particularly pleased that many posters are in "mint condition."

Many of the graphic artists represented are important today, she says. Among the most notable shown are Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Rick Griffin, Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso and Milton Glaser, who made the once ubiquitous image of folk singer Bob Dylan in silhouette with colored hair patterned after Islamic designs.

Contemporary posters show the actual picture of the performer and lack the graphic and visual aesthetic of those in the exhibition, Marchicelli says. And video has replaced the need for the "visual stimulation" these images offer, she adds.

"So often we consider [things like] these posters part of a throw-away culture," Marchicelli says, "but many come out of the avant-garde and bring those avant-garde aesthetic elements into the mainstream where they connect with the fine art in a way that we may not immediately recognize."