Between the Covers

Unbound. A collection of 15 flyers promoting the First International San Francisco Armory Show directed by Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance artist Michael Bowen. Photomechanically reproduced flyers on 8.5" x 14" sheets. Near fine with slight edgewear from hanging. Each flyer advertises the event along with a different artist on each poster with a photocopied image of one of their works. The exhibition included 50 artists and over "5000 works of art." Among the artists were Melinda Gebbie, wife of Alan Moore, a comic book artist who was famous for her collaborations with Moore on *Tomorrow Stories* and *Lost Girls*. According to her website, "she uses comix storytelling to underline cultural movements which drift like her characters." Also featured are California surrealist painter, Guy Colwell, who became known for his strong portrayal of African-Americans; Henry Sultan, a California artist and "community muralist," who exhibited his "Art of the Mandala" during this run. Sultan's artist statement according to his webpage is, "I was never a hippie, I just looked like one."

The festival was the brainchild of artist Michael Bowen, an important San Francisco Renaissance artist and friend to fellow counterculture figures such as Timothy Leary, Janis Joplin, and Wallace Berman. He was the co-founder of the underground newspaper the *San Francisco Oracle*, and founder and organizer of the Human Be-In. Bowen saw the month long exhibits as a means to display new and established talent side-by-side in a celebration of not only California art, but the international scene: "The First International San Francisco Armory Show offers a viable alternative to this double blind situation, presenting artists whose works are imbued with feeling, color, light and vision, evoking a sense of the unknown, creating possibilities and potentialities of the emergence of the New Man."

An attractive collection of images.

Item #390454