New Absolutely-Must-Visit Poster Print Shop And Gallery In San Francisco

If you’re going to San Francisco - or if you’re lucky enough to live there - the Haight Street Art Center (HSAC), a first-of-its-kind poster print shop and gallery that supports a collective of poster artists, is a must visit.

Dennis Larkins' incredible "Eyeconic" flies high above a wall of rock posters.

With 7,000 square feet of gallery exhibition space, HSAC is one of the largest galleries devoted to poster art in the United States. In addition to the print shop, the Center features community engagement facilities, including a classroom for teaching poster art techniques, a special events space, and a large gallery. Permanent and temporary exhibitions will be free of charge to the public, and the Center and its artists will sell silkscreen and offset prints.

Founded on a cooperative operational model, the HSAC features a state-of-the-art print shop to be managed by and for artists. The Center’s business model offers artists low overhead costs to improve the economics for creating and selling poster art. 

Exercising public art’s proven power to attract, inspire and connect, HSAC will serve not only the Lower Haight, but the city at large with educational programming for the San Francisco community: from students to seniors, apprentices to master artists, and the local residents to visitors.

The Art of Consciousness 

Mariusz Knorowski, Chief Curator at Poster Museum at Wilanów, Warsaw, Poland.

The inaugural exhibition, “The Art of Consciousness,” features more than 90 seminal works from 1965 to 1967. On display will be never-before-seen Family Dog original art from the “Big Five” of San Francisco rock poster art – Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, and Wes Wilson – whose vision inspired thousands of young people in San Francisco and provided the visual vocabulary for the vibrant community that formed in the Haight-Ashbury.

“It covers the evolution of poster art before the Summer of Love, from the Seed and Are We Next in 1965 through the psychedelic Avalon and Fillmore posters of the spring of 1967,” said Moonalice guitarist and poster philanthropist, Roger McNamee. “Check it out!”

The Art of Consciousness” runs through September. Entrance is free. Regular hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Sunday. 215 Haight St., San Francisco: https://haightstreetart.org

About Haight Street Art Center

The Haight Street Art Center (HSAC) is a 501(c)3 non-profit San Francisco arts collective established to promote poster art production and education. The Center’s community outreach relates to poster art history and cultural impact along with a deep commitment to extending San Francisco’s proud heritage of publicly accessible artwork—artwork created to celebrate, advocate, and connect people.

Left to Right: Roger McNamee, Jeremy Fish and Peter McQuaid at the Grand Opening of the HSAC.

Celebration Of Poster Art At The Haight Street Art Center

Situated in the heart of Haight at 215 Haight Street, near the corner of Laguna, the Haight Street Art Center opened its doors to the public on Saturday 1 July with a Grand Opening that included activities for kids, printing demonstrations for adults, gallery tours, and a welcoming address from Mariusz Knorowski, Chief Curator at Poster Museum at Wilanów, the oldest poster museum in the world located in Warsaw, Poland.

Festivities began at 1pm with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the iconic Bronze Bunny, gatekeeper to San Francisco’s Lower Haight neighborhood. 

A series of galleries displayed 90 posters from the breakthrough years of 1965-67 in the opening exhibit entitled “The Art of Consciousness," while artists demonstrated the silk screen process, enabling visitors to walk out with a freshly inked poster.

Celebration of poster art

The “Big Five” of poster art, who made San Francisco the epicenter of the genre are well represented: Stanley Mouse, Wes Wilson, Alton Kelly, Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin. 

“The purpose of the art center is to invigorate poster art by providing a print shop and gallery that dramatically lowers the cost of creating and selling poster art,” said Roger McNamee, the Moonalice lead singer and guitarist with a passion for poster art. “It also provides a platform so that the artists can form and manage a collective for mutual benefit."

When Moonalice started in 2007 as a ’60s-style San Francisco psychedelic roots band, one of the founding precepts was a freshly produced poster for every show. “We figured we’d play 30 or 40 shows a year,” said McNamee, adding, “And we’ve played 100 shows a year for 10 years.” There are now close to 1,000 Moonalice posters, many of which paper the walls as well as the stairwell between the floors at the art center.

Moonalice model

In the day of the Big Five, poster artists were paid around $500 for a poster plus a dozen copies. The promoter, or the band, got the copyright, which meant that if a design hit it big in the aftermarket, the income from all those concert posters sold in bookstores and record stores went to someone other than the artist.

This is in stark contrast to the Moonalice business model, which is to pay the artist more up front, plus allow the artist keeps the copyright. There are some 35 artists in the Moonalice stable, and they will be the first to benefit from the art center’s platform.

Living history museum

The building is part of a Spanish Revival complex put up by the Works Progress Administration in 1934 as San Francisco State Teachers College. It sits on a huge lot, most of which has been developed into market-rate housing by Wood Partners.

“This is like a living history museum on top of a museum,” said Peter McQuaid, executive director of the center, who will oversee a staff of four. “We want to return to the craftsmanship where the artists print the work themselves.”

The art center includes the original San Francisco State entrance on the southeast corner of Haight and Buchanan streets, and occupies the down-slope annex, its mid-block entrance marked by the Bronze Bunny sculpture by Jeremy Fish. The entry is on the gallery level, with the print shop above it fully outfitted with scanners, printers and racks of paper.

Opening exhibition

The opening exhibition, “The Art of Consciousness,” runs through September. Entrance is free. Regular hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Sunday. 215 Haight St., S.F. https://haightstreetart.org

Carolyn Ferris and Wes Wilson Collaborate To Create Psychedelic Rock Poster Art

The queen of the surreal and the father of the rock '60s concert poster had worked together before, but in July this year Carolyn Ferris and Wes Wilson officially teamed up to design a sublimely surreal poster for the Doobie Decibel System show at The Westcott Theater in Syracuse, NY. As Carolyn described it, “This is Wes Wilson’s and my first copyrighted image together in true collaborative/team effort. We had great fun designing it and bringing it into its vividly full and magical life.” The DDS collaboration was followed shortly after by another poster, this time for Roger McNamee’s other band, Moonalice. 

Carolyn who used to live in Fairfax, California, recently moved to Missouri near to where Wes is based.  Describing her career in art Carolyn said, “I worked with Timothy Leary over a span of about six years, and have created work for Santana, The Fillmore, and The Warfield. I joined the incredible Moonalice poster artist pool in 2009; within it, I find sanctuary with great music and adventure. In the years I’ve been with Moonalice, my style to date has now changed three times!  I started making posters with computer art using photoshop. In 2013, I used acrylic on canvas to create posters.  By 2015, I put away those acrylics and I’m now creating posters using ink on paper. I totally enjoy using ink, and now I even hand draw the lettering!” 

Wes Wilson, who is generally acknowledged as the father of the '60s rock concert poster, was born Robert Wesley Wilson on July 15, 1937 in Sacramento, California. He helped pioneer what is now known as the psychedelic poster. His style of filling all available space with lettering, of creating fluid forms made from letters, and using flowing letters to create shapes became the standard that most psychedelic artists followed. It helped put the “psychedelic” in the art. Today, Wes Wilson creates paintings, but still occasionally does new posters or new art of interest. 

Recent collaboration between Carolyn and Wes includes the amazing poster art below for Doobie Decibel System, Moonalice and for #yeson64.