In the back gallery of SUMA, which is dedicated to Jim Jones, the Cedar City painter and local legend who helped establish this fine institution of art, resides an exhibit of postcard-size posters from the Fillmore West, collected by the artist’s brother. While living in San Francisco in the 1960s, Scott Jones stole, collected, and stowed away handbills from what have since become iconic, historic performances at the venue, when it was under the ownership and promotional direction of Bill Graham. The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane—quintessential Haight-Ashbury artists—are advertised in wonky, hard-to-decipher fonts, swirling in patterns of optical illusion and executed in electric colors that melt like lava lamps.

Graham was initially concerned that people wouldn’t be able to read the posters—a major faux pas in graphic design—but one of the Fillmore’s principal poster designers, Wes Wilson, convinced him that the difficulty would keep viewers looking longer. SUMA’s interim director and director of curatorial affairs, Dr. Rebecca Bloom, has selected a baker’s dozen of Wilson’s works from the hundreds in the collection, focusing on the flowing line of the psychedelic movement—a nod across museums to Utah Valley University’s current exhibition on Art Nouveau poster artist Alphonse Mucha (see our review here).

It’s clear Jones spent a good amount of time at the Fillmore West, swiping things off the walls. Because of their mint condition, Bloom suspects some were freshly printed, though others show staple marks, and one is even marked with bird poop. These are multiples—handbills that would have been produced in the hundreds. They are chromolithographs, a process that allows photographs to be incorporated into lithographic printing, giving the works an almost risograph-like quality in their layering, color saturation, and stippled pixels.

Bloom’s curation guides the viewer through a chronological art-historical tour of the influences embedded in the displayed pieces, directly tracing their roots to broader cultural histories and movements. “Think of these artists as inventing a new visual language that reflects the music—the overall concert experience you’re going to have in this psychedelic moment,” Bloom says. “But they are not creating it in a vacuum. They’re referencing pop culture of their present and of the past.”

Psychedelic motifs from the 1960s can be traced to ancient cultures newly encountered through colonization, imperialism, archaeology, and the opening of borders—forces that exposed the Western world to civilizations far more ornate and intricate than anything pioneer America had produced. The treasures excavated from King Tut’s tomb in the 1920s sparked a mania for Egyptian symbology: beetles and scarabs, vines and blossoms, echoed in revival brooches with precious stone inlays and wings. The headdresses associated with Egyptian royalty and the peacock patterning of their regalia appear in early posters. Later handbills adopt typefaces adapted from French Art Nouveau lettering, whose sensuous lines were themselves influenced by Japanese woodblock prints. The effect mirrored the concert experience itself—often drug-induced—even if it wasn’t always immediately legible. Bloom notes that the museum frequently uses this collection in typeface workshops, as examples of what not to do. These intricacies, drawn from ancient and non-Western cultures and reinterpreted through an American lens, rejected the status quo and mainstream industrialization, signaling a return to the natural world and to artistic freedom.

“The counterculture was resonating with this disenchantment with Western civilization,” Bloom says of the psychedelic movement. “During the Cold War and the Vietnam War, people were looking for alternatives to mainstream culture or religion—turning to indigenous cultures and ancient, non-Western, non-European influences to guide their imagery.”

The handbills’ subject matter also reflects the resurgence of women’s liberation at the time. Nude women appear smiling, hair loose, confidence radiating—culturally parallel to the turn-of-the-century “New Woman” Mucha used to sell his products. This is a freer woman, unrestrained and integrated, embodying changing liberal views of women, their bodies, and their role in society. While the imagery certainly sexualized women, they are shown dancing, liberated, unabashed.

One of the two pieces in the show not designed by Wes Wilson is by Bonnie MacLean, an outsider artist who began doing chalkboard designs for the Fillmore before her talent was recognized and she was promoted to concert poster designer. MacLean places an American World War I character at the center of her composition, surrounded by Tiffany-like stained-glass imagery of bugs, lilies, and dragonflies—as if Egyptomania and Art Nouveau collided at a concert on LSD. The color palette is stunning, the influences clear and deftly reinterpreted for the time.

The colors in this show buzz—they vibrate against the eye, using complementary hues and dense patterning to create a sensory hum. The effect is electric, like feeling a bass line sync with your heartbeat. These posters reflect the technological innovations that made runs of hundreds of handbills possible, while still standing on the shoulders of the past. Artists forged a new generational visual language that would resonate with other music movements, including jazz and blues. What has come to be seen as uniquely American art is, in fact, rooted in traditions that existed long before America itself. Just as Art Nouveau emerged from a rejection of industrial production that stripped life from craft, artists of the 1960s were increasingly fed up with the minimalism of its predecessor, Abstract Expressionism, gravitating instead toward organic, flowing lines that embodied the era’s ethos of freedom and free love.

The Flowing Line: Psychedelia & the Art Nouveau Revival, Southern Utah Museum of Art, Cedar City, through Apr. 24

Genevieve Vahl

Genevieve Vahl is a writer, farmer and artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her writing focuses on how art and community intersect, how to bring access to food and covering climate solutions around the Salt Lake Valley. She also writes poetry, binds artist books, makes paper and runs cyanotype prints from film.