The Bahr Gallery (www.bahrgallery.com), an art gallery dedicated to rare, first-edition, psychedelic rock poster art, will feature vintage Grateful Dead posters in an exhibition that runs through December 31, 2022. Bahr Gallery is located in Oyster Bay New York and is open Friday through Sunday from 1:00 – 5:00 p.m. and by appointment. Admission is free.
Curator and owner Ted Bahr noted that, “unlike today’s commemorative posters one finds at a Phish show, these posters were created to advertise the concerts and sell tickets. They were stapled to telephone poles, hung in store windows and at college dorms and so many of them were treated pretty roughly and tossed away making the few that exist in good shape increasingly valuable today.”
Today, bands maintain artistic control and use posters to add to their income stream. Bahr explained that, “back in the sixties, the bands has absolutely nothing to do with how they were represented. That’s what makes this walk through time in the Exhibition so interesting – so many different artists were taking a whack at images that could represent the Grateful Dead with complete creative freedom. The famous Skeleton and Roses imagery, for example, was found and penknifed out of a book by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse for a 1966 poster and that was the first association between the Dead and that iconography.”
While each of San Francisco’s “Big Five” poster artists; Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, and Alton Kelley made posters advertising Grateful Dead concerts, Griffin and Mouse and Kelley were most closely associated with the band’s visual expression. Other artists representing in the Grateful Dead Exhibition include David Singer, Peter Max, Richard Rauschenberg, Randy Tuten, Lee Conklin, George Sargent, Dennis Larkins, Micael Priest and Phil Garris.
Highlights of the Exhibition include a rare first printing of the 1966 “Skeleton & Roses” poster, as well as a first edition “Aoxomoxoa,” by Rick Griffin, an oversized 1969 poster later used for the band’s third album cover, plus a rare 1969 Ice Palace Las Vegas poster and the iconic 1968 poster known as the “Santana Lion,” which was a Grateful Dead poster that Santana asked artist Lee Conklin to repurpose for the cover of their first album. More than 35 works in total comprise the Exhibition.
First printing Aoxomoxoa poster by Rick Griffin, 1969. The Dead asked Griffin if he would repurpose the image for their third album cover.
First printing Skeleton & Roses poster by Stanley Mouse & Alton Kelley, 1966
First printing “Santana Lion poster by Lee Conklin 1968. Filled with hidden faces and figures, Santana asked Conklin if they could used the image to grace their first album. Released after Santana’s triumphant Woodstock appearance their debut album hit #4 on the U.S. Billboard charts
Virtually all pieces are first editions, and are accompanied with meticulous background and history, placing each piece in context. Much of this art currently hangs in the Smithsonian, Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, the Louvre, and other leading museums and institutions around the world.
The Bahr Gallery, which opened in April 2018, has several rooms totaling 1,200 square feet and features nearly 60 psychedelic masterworks on rotation on the walls and close to 300 framed pieces on premises. Past Exhibitions include “Woodstock and Other Festivals,” “The British Invasion” and individual retrospectives featuring each of the San Francisco Big Five poster artists. A look at some of the Grateful Dead posters in the 2022 Exhibition can be found on the Bahr Gallery website here: https://www.bahrgallery.com/band-master/grateful-dead
Follow Bahr Gallery on Instagram or Facebook @BahrGallery.
[Sponsored content: Bahr Gallery is a JamBase partner.]
