{"id":101687,"date":"2026-02-16T06:19:34","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T13:19:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=101687"},"modified":"2026-02-25T14:40:19","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T21:40:19","slug":"electric-lines-psychedelic-posters-from-the-fillmore-west-at-suma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/electric-lines-psychedelic-posters-from-the-fillmore-west-at-suma\/","title":{"rendered":"Electric Lines: Psychedelic Posters from the Fillmore West at SUMA"},"content":{"rendered":"

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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\u2014quintessential Haight-Ashbury artists\u2014are advertised in wonky, hard-to-decipher fonts, swirling in patterns of optical illusion and executed in electric colors that melt like lava lamps.<\/h4>\n

Graham was initially concerned that people wouldn\u2019t be able to read the posters\u2014a major faux pas in graphic design\u2014but one of the Fillmore\u2019s principal poster designers, Wes Wilson, convinced him that the difficulty would keep viewers looking longer. SUMA\u2019s interim director and director of curatorial affairs, Dr. Rebecca Bloom, has selected a baker\u2019s dozen of Wilson\u2019s works from the hundreds in the collection, focusing on the flowing line of the psychedelic movement\u2014a nod across museums to Utah Valley University\u2019s current exhibition on Art Nouveau poster artist Alphonse Mucha (see our review here<\/a>).<\/h4>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2014handbills 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.<\/h4>\n

Bloom\u2019s 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. \u201cThink of these artists as inventing a new visual language that reflects the music\u2014the overall concert experience you\u2019re going to have in this psychedelic moment,\u201d Bloom says. \u201cBut they are not creating it in a vacuum. They\u2019re referencing pop culture of their present and of the past.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/a>Psychedelic motifs from the 1960s can be traced to ancient cultures newly encountered through colonization, imperialism, archaeology, and the opening of borders\u2014forces that exposed the Western world to civilizations far more ornate and intricate than anything pioneer America had produced. The treasures excavated from King Tut\u2019s 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\u2014often drug-induced\u2014even if it wasn\u2019t 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.<\/h4>\n

\u201cThe counterculture was resonating with this disenchantment with Western civilization,\u201d Bloom says of the psychedelic movement. \u201cDuring the Cold War and the Vietnam War, people were looking for alternatives to mainstream culture or religion\u2014turning to indigenous cultures and ancient, non-Western, non-European influences to guide their imagery.\u201d<\/h4>\n

The handbills\u2019 subject matter also reflects the resurgence of women\u2019s liberation at the time. Nude women appear smiling, hair loose, confidence radiating\u2014culturally parallel to the turn-of-the-century \u201cNew Woman\u201d 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.<\/h4>\n

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\u2014as 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.<\/h4>\n

The colors in this show buzz\u2014they 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\u2019s ethos of freedom and free love.<\/h4>\n

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The Flowing Line: Psychedelia & the Art Nouveau Revival<\/em>, Southern Utah Museum of Art<\/a>, Cedar City, through Apr. 24<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1733,"featured_media":101689,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/2009.2.125.sm_.bonnie.maclean.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-25 14:36:04","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1733"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101687"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101771,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101687\/revisions\/101771"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}