Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era
May 24–Sept 16, 2007
Installation view of Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 24–September 16, 2007). Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins
Summer of Love revisits the unprecedented explosion of contemporary art and popular culture brought about by the civil unrest and pervasive social change of the 1960s and early '70s, when a new psychedelic aesthetic emerged in art, music, film, architecture, graphic design, and fashion. The exhibition includes paintings, photographs and sculptures by Isaac Abrams, Richard Avedon, Lynda Benglis, Richard Hamilton, Elliott Landy, Jimi Hendrix (his only known watercolor), Robert Indiana, Yayoi Kusama, Richard Lindner, and John McCracken, among others, as well as a rich selection of important posters, album covers and underground magazines. A special emphasis is placed on environments as well as on film, video and multimedia installations, including works by Jordan Belson, USCO, Stan VanDerBeek, James Whitney, and Lamonte Young and Marian Zazeela. The exhibition includes films of performances and light shows, and spotlights places such as the UFO nightclub in London and the Human Be-In in San Francisco, featuring Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary. Organized by Tate Liverpool and originally presented there, the show has toured to the Kunsthalle Schirn Frankfurt and the Kunsthalle Wien.