Women of Psychedelic Design

“It was a period responsible for radical cultural change, and graphic design is of course part of that,” she says. “But there were things about it that weren’t so pretty.” When author Joan Didion visited San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in 1967, she cooly observed the “desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum.” She saw five-year-olds on acid and spoke with women who, after being shunted from “entering the men’s talk,” found their “trip” in “keeping house and baking.” Does the same hold true for the women involved in the period’s design? I want to know where they are and how that Summer of Love might have filtered into their graphic work.

journalism—whatever you want to call it—the design literature machine.” In the prevailing history of psychedelic graphic design, the Big Five are the figures whose work and stories dominate the era. Their posters hang in galleries and are collected by major museums. Finding the names of the women involved in the period’s graphics, on the other hand, requires some significant digging; there are no eager publicists waiting for your phone call, no email addresses on websites or directories referring you to estates. The women I’ve spoken to for this article are the ones I’ve been able to surface, and only after following a veritable trail of breadcrumbs—many leads went cold, though, and countless stories remain deeply buried.

Victor Moscoso, Alton Kelley, Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse, and Wes Wilson make up the aforementioned five men, known today as the “Big Five,” said to be “responsible for designing the majority of the best San Francisco psychedelic posters in the 1960s.” 1 But Sandhaus is skeptical of this particular grouping.

“We have to keep in mind that many people become known through press,” she says. “Not to diminish their work at all—they were producing things that were prominent and recognizable. But to the degree that they then became known as the Big Five... I wonder about that. The history of design can often be the history of publicity, promotion,

At one point, each of the Big Five was working on promotional material for rock concert promoter Bill Graham and his legendary Fillmore West venue in San Francisco. As word spread of the sudden cultural explosion taking place in Haight-Ashbury at the beginning of 1967, an estimated 100,000 young people descended upon the small neighborhood of just 25 blocks. Some would dub the months that followed the “Summer of Love.” Some, like Didion, were far more dubious of the role consent played in all the loving. For the churning wheels of the design literature machine, it was the climate that generated the classic swirling poster known as the psychedelic print.

By the time school was out for the year, promoters predicted that three million kids would show up to dance in...