The beautiful cover image for the book was adapted from a 1995 Grateful Dead Mardi Gras poster (2/24-26) designed by Troy Alders. It’s also fun to see so many original sketches, artist’s proofs and process materials (blue lines, printing plates, film etc.) illustrating how the works evolved. And Cushway’s chronology goes all the way up to the posters Michael Everett created (and Cushway published) for the last Dead tours in 1995, so it gives a nice historical overview of the art that accompanied the group’s entire career. Cushway doesn’t just dwell on the best-known artists, either-he is also generous in his coverage of lesser-known but still extremely talented folks such as Lee Conklin (you loved his cover for the first Santana album), Bonnie McLean (Bill Graham’s ex), Randy Tuten and Mark Arminski. Along the way, we learn much about the tools and techniques they employed, and their relationships with the bands, promoters and each other. He uses interviews he and others conducted with top artists-including SF poster pioneers Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, David Singer and others-to tell the story of the movement in their own words. Just out from Soft Skull Press (an imprint of Conterpoint Books) is Cushway’s Art of the Dead, which carries the cover tag line: “A Celebration of the Artists Behind the American Rock Poster Movement.” With just over 200 large and small reproductions of pieces relating to the Dead (and other bands, too), it offers a trip through time, using the Dead as the primary touchstone, but with more of a focus on the artists and the development of the poster as a modern art form, than on the band. Though Cushway states that he’s “no longer in the poster business,” he has turned his obsession with poster art and artists in a new direction: book publishing. Cushway has also been responsible for publishing more than 500 limited edition prints, silkscreens, letterpress and photogravure posters and other works for modern bands (REM, Siouxsie & the Banshees, et al) as well as ones by old favorites since he first became intrigued by the medium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he lived for many years before relocating to the Bay Area in the late ’80s. In the late ’80s, Cushway became an art dealer himself, buying up more than a million posters and other works from collections of all sizes, and establishing his San Francisco-based ArtRock enterprise as the most successful business of its kind in the world. But he loves the art that the band has inspired since the mid -’60s, and he also cares deeply about the artists who created those hundreds upon hundreds of posters, album covers and free-standing art pieces. Working with Alton Kelley, Stanley produced gig posters that blended the decorative elements of Art Nouveau and hallucinatory graphics with an avant-garde vision.Īfter his aesthetic became less fashionable, Stanley made a career out of drawing monsters and once tried to sue Pixar for allegedly lifting his character designs for the film Monsters Inc.Philip Cushway will not hesitate to tell you that he is not a Dead Head - not a fan of the Dead’s music, particularly. By the time he landed in San Francisco in 1965 he was ready to try something else and began producing posters for Chet Helms, a promoter at the area’s famous Avalon Ballroom. Stanley learnt his trade under Ed Roth, airbrushing T-shirts and cars with Weirdo Hot Rod art, a movement which developed a cult following in his hometown of Detroit. His posters for The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Van Morrison and Quicksilver Messenger Service defined the look and feel of California’s psych scene in the mid 1960s. Stanley Mouse is arguably one of the biggest names in psychedelic graphic design. You can read our explanation post here or peruse the mice archive here. EDITOR’S NOTE: This post was part of our It’s Mice That takeover on April Fools’ Day 2014.
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