Back on December 1, 2009 I wrote an illustrated article titled Hey, Hey, LBJ…, an essay concerning U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson as depicted in anti-Vietnam war posters from the 1960s. I self-published my treatise on the occasion of President Obama deploying 30,000 U.S. combat troops to Afghanistan. While there are obvious differences between the Vietnam and Afghan wars, the…
The Museum at Bethel Woods, an institution dedicated to the examination of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair held for three days in August of 1969, officially opened on June 2, 2008, on the exact site of the original Woodstock festival. A splendid building of wood and stone that looks much like a fancy mountain lodge resort, the museum sits…
The first day of summer in 2017 was June 20, but the date also marked another occasion, that of the 50th Anniversary of the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco, California. Remarkably enough in 1967 I passed though that Haight Ashbury scene as a wide-eyed, impressionable 14 year old, and what I saw there never left me. In fact…
The UK Tate Gallery has mounted an exhibition titled, Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era, an exhibit that, “attempts to uncover this forgotten and repressed aesthetic that continues to exert an increasingly powerful influence on many contemporary artists.” The Tate also developed an adjunct show on the aesthetics of psychedelia for the Kunsthalle in Vienna – both exhibits…
I created this cartoon of a turkey at his Thanksgiving feast when I was only 17 years old. My pen drawing titled, No Thanks!, served as the cover for the Southern California psychedelic “underground” newspaper, The Tribe. This particular edition of the pre-Watergate paper hit the streets on November 26th, 1971. Its anti-Nixon theme certainly didn’t win me any friends,…
