As part of the celebration of its 30th anniversary, the Outsider Art Fair is excited to present Field Trip: Psychedelic Solution, 1986-1995, a special exhibition for its Curated Spaces during the 2022 edition. Featuring work championed by the legendary underground Greenwich Village gallery, Psychedelic Solution, and its founder, Jacaeber Kastor, the exhibition will be curated by renowned contemporary artist Fred Tomaselli.
Most closely associated with 1960s popular youth culture, when the widespread use of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and other hallucinogens inspired a generation to reimagine the universe and our place within it, psychedelic art in fact dates back to prehistoric times and has been part of an esoteric tradition of mind-expansion for centuries. This art is often made by self-taught artists or those whose self-awareness is profoundly idiosyncratic, and the resulting cosmology is imbued with mystical and spiritual concerns as well as fundamental questions involving perception and reality, situating it as a movement close to visionary art and outsider art vernaculars. The way psychedelic art has remained largely unacknowledged and undervalued by the art world may invite comparison to Outsider Art’s trajectory only a few decades ago.
In homage to the folkloric aspects of psychedelic art, from which much of this movement organically arose, Field Trip will highlight singular artifacts that capture definitive cultural moments, including a painting on a bass drum head by Grace Slick, made when she was the lead singer for Great Society, before she joined the Jefferson Airplane, the original ink drawing dated 1900 by Edmund J. Sullivan called “A Skeleton Amid Roses” that became the genesis of the logo for the Grateful Dead, and rare examples from the DIY cottage industry of blotter acid prints, similar to fine art prints but dipped in liquid LSD, then perforated in order to distribute consistent doses and embellished with graphic designs and coded imagery meant to articulate the sense of wonder, fantasy, and discovery inherent in tripping.
This unprecedented survey draws extensively from the personal collection of Kastor himself, who between 1986-1995 mounted dozens of groundbreaking exhibitions, arranging important loans and consignments from artists who became central to Kastor’s community. The exhibition features a pantheon of greats and a number of fine artists whose work was deeply informed by the psychedelic experience, including Isaac Abrams, Joe Coleman, Bruce Conner, Jean Conner, Alex Grey, Allyson Grey, H.R. Giger, Olga Spiegel and Suzanne Williams along with legends like Lee Conklin, Robert Crumb, Rick Griffin, Alton Kelly, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, Gary Panter, Spain Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton, Robert Williams, Wes Wilson and S. Clay Wilson, whose work with many of the most popular bands from the Sixties and beyond are burnt into our cultural retina.
Many of these artists are instantly recognizable for their creative contributions to the populist forms of album cover art, underground comics and poster art, but their persistent neglect and omission from institutional art history goes to show how unorthodox and revolutionary their aesthetic terms remain to this day, and suggest, as curator Fred Tomaselli puts it, that the art world rewards the formalist precepts of the minimal over the messy and at times uncomfortable expressions of the maximal. Drawing on nearly seventy years of radical creativity, this special exhibition for the Outsider Art Fair seeks to extricate these important figures from the nostalgia of their pop culture frame and set their work in a broader historical continuum that, considering recent evidence in prehistoric cave paintings of psychoactive mushrooms and the visual distortions associated with psychedelics, is as old as human consciousness itself, and still vital in contemporary art.
Fred Tomaselli (b.1956) is an American artist born in Santa Monica, CA, now living in New York City. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums including the Joslyn Art Museum, (Omaha, 2018), the Toledo Museum of Art (2016), the Brooklyn Museum (2010), the Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, Buffalo (2003) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1999). His art is in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum; the Albright Knox Art Gallery; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and many others. He is represented by James Cohan Gallery, New York.
- Carlo McCormick