RON HENGGELER

June 14, 2024
Pyschedelic Posters on display

Art of Noise at SFMOMA 

Displayed floor to ceiling, hundreds of expressive works - SFMOMA's entire trove of psychedelic rock posters-are presented at the museum for the first time.

This grouping illuminates concerts put on by the famed promoters Bill Graham and Chet Helms between 1966 and 1971 for landmark San Francisco venues like The Matrix, The Fillmore, the Avalon Ballroom, and beyond.

Music is a pillar of our creative culture and artistic output. While fundamentally sonic, our perception of music goes beyond just hearing it-design and art have long established a visual counterpart to its performance and transmission.

Art of Noise presents more than eight hundred works that have shaped our relationship to music over the past century. It shows how our experiences are built by both the sounds we hear and the artifacts that help illustrate or activate them, whether through color and composition or through form, material, and mechanics.

Presented at SFMOMA are 128 album covers from the SFMOMA
Library and San Francisco's Letterform Archive that capture the energy and emotion of the music of the 1950s and 1960s and suggest how this pivotal era set the stage for decades of covers to come.

The commercial introduction of the twelve-inch LP (long playing) vinyl record in 1948 established a new format for record art. While the first LP album covers featured simple title blocks and a photograph of the recording artist, in the 1950s designers began taking a more modernist approach. Experimenting with bold typography, innovative photography, and abstraction, they set out to graphically express the essence of the music. Record labels for jazz and other emerging genres gave creative license to designers and artists-like Reid Miles for Blue Note Records, Alex Steinweiss for Columbia Records, and Laini Abernathy for Delmark Records-whose styles became synonymous with the sounds of the record companies.

Across album covers, posters, and flyers, graphic design can complement or convey a musical sound and provide a parallel to our auditory experience of it. These visual outputs are so essential that genres of music are often associated with specific typographic styles, color palettes, and even production techniques-from hand drawn to photocopied to digitally manipulated.