"All the Pages Are My Days": Print and Visual Culture of the Grateful Dead in Context

By Library, University

Friday, June 13, 2025

+ 8 dates

  • Monday, June 16, 2025
  • Tuesday, June 17, 2025
  • Wednesday, June 18, 2025
  • Thursday, June 19, 2025
  • Friday, June 20, 2025
  • Monday, June 23, 2025
  • Tuesday, June 24, 2025
  • Wednesday, June 25, 2025
View map

This exhibition celebrates the art and print material generated by the Grateful Dead and their fans in the context of the printing explosion of the 1960s and ‘70s. As the Dead came into popularity and an anti-establishment counterculture spread throughout the nation, democratic print technologies were concomitantly adopted into widespread use. In the Bay Area and beyond, activists, experimental poets, and psychedelic artists took advantage of spirit duplicators, mimeographs, and other accessible technologies to create and disseminate works of self-expression and political action. This exhibition focuses on the social life of printed materials, placing the Dead’s print culture in cultural and political situ. 

 

In the 1960s, a new generation of young people–products of the post-war baby boom who by then formed a sizable segment of the overall U.S. population–were bristling against convention and finding their voice. As the civil rights and worldwide independence movements achieved momentum and the “New Left” found ideological purchase, activists identified new means of sharing vital information through the creation of alternative publications and an underground press. The mainstream–or “overground”–press took notice:

 

The information officers of the New American Left have rediscovered an ancient political ally: print power. All over the country, radical and "movement" organizations have spawned their own print shops run by their own pressmen to churn out an increasing number of posters, pamphlets, handbills, and flyers. Whether it's to mobilize a march on Washington, explain the advantages of "Free Speech" for GIs, or advertise courses at an alternative university, the rebel presses are rolling. By the thousands, their folded-and-stapled brochures, decorated with crude graphics, are being given away at hastily set up campus tables or sold in the standard subculture outlets (Associated Press 1970).

 

Radical print shops popped up in the Bay Area and spread internationally, circulating a wide network of print material engaged with politics, art and literature, and prodigious social change. As revolutionary ideas spread, artists experimented with the expressive capacities of emergent print technologies, collectively crafting an unconventional and acrobatically imaginative graphic identity.

 

The exploratory, democratic, and liberatory attitude expressed in the print culture of the period was reflected across genres of artmaking, and was to be found, acutely and enduringly, in the music of and visual culture surrounding the Grateful Dead. This exhibition also features artifacts reflective of the band’s visual vernacular, born from the psychedelic vocabulary of the ‘60s and ‘70s and transformed, over time, into a distinctive brand and cultural touchstone. The band was formed at a moment of optimism amid radical upheaval in the Bay Area, and their visual language has transmitted the spirit of the period to new and nostalgic audiences across the decades that followed. 

 

Event Details

See Who Is Interested

0 people are interested in this event

User Activity

No recent activity