Alton Kelley, Psychedelic Designer, Dies at 67

JUNE 10, 2008 TAGS: 1960S, DESIGN, COUNTERCULTURE COMMENTS (2)

Alton Kelley, a graphic designer whose handbills and posters came to define the visual identity of the hippie movement in the 1960s, died on June 1, at the age of 67. With longtime collaborator Stanley Mouse, Kelley combined Art Nouveau lettering with exotic, far flung images to create distinctive combinations that took cues from psychedelic or hallucinatory visualization. These posters and handbills, which were ostensibly created to advertise concerts, have become sought after artifacts of the Haight-Ashbury community in the 1960s.

Kelley peddled in alluring pastiche. His posters and handbills incorporated elements of Art Deco, Bauhaus, pre-Rafaelite, Taro, Native American, and eastern design. The lettering, often indecipherable in its undulating, uneven form, was perhaps Kelley and Mouse’s most iconic and lasting contribution to graphic design. Two of his most celebrated posters, created for concerts at San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom, are classics.

One for the Grateful Dead, contort the lettering around an image of a skeleton adorned with roses, inspired by an illustration in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The Dead used the image as covers for their albums American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead. The other, known as “The Girl with Green Hair,” set an image of an altered pre-Rafaelite woman with what seems to be a joint in her hand. If music was the presumptive text of Kelley’s work, drug use was its obvious subtext.

One of the first posters that Kelley and Mouse made, for a concert by Big Brother and the Holding Company, repurposed the logo of Zig-Zag cigarette papers, which were often used to roll joints. These visual allusions tend to overstate the role drugs played in Kelley’s creative process. More than anything, Kelley and Mouse were visual collectors, who perceived the affinities between the explosive nature of creativity in San Francisco with other periods of countercultural artistic production, like fin-de-siècle France.

After 1968, Kelley became disillusioned by the attention given to San Francisco after the so-called “Summer of Love.” Kelley recalled, “By 1968 it had pretty much gone to hell with all the religious nuts coming, the politicos, the junkies, dope dealers.”

Kelley and Mouse continued their collaboration, forming a t-shirt company and designing album art well into the 1980s with both the Dead as well as groups like Journey. But their halcyon days in the Haight-Ashbury scene from 1964 to 1968 produced their best and most collected work. Mint copies of their posters from that era command prices in the thousands at auctions. Prices aside, Kelley’s designs are iconic visual counterpart to the cultural and musical revolution of the 1960s.

Slideshow from the NYTimes