Dead Central exhibits are free and open to the public. We welcome your visit during all McHenry Library hours.
Dead Central is a gallery space on the Main Floor of McHenry Library at UC Santa Cruz dedicated to exploring cultural, social, and creative moments in the twentieth century in which the Grateful Dead played a critical part. Exhibits feature unique materials from the Grateful Dead Archive alongside original sources from across the University Library's rich historical collections. The creation of Dead Central was made possible through a generous grant from the Brittingham Family Foundation.
Now Open:
This exhibition celebrates the art and print material generated by the Grateful Dead and their fans in the context of the printing explosion of the 1960s and ‘70s. As the Dead came into popularity and an anti-establishment counterculture spread throughout the nation, democratic print technologies were concomitantly adopted into widespread use. In the Bay Area and beyond, activists, experimental poets, and psychedelic artists took advantage of spirit duplicators, mimeographs, and other accessible technologies to create and disseminate works of self-expression and political action. This exhibition focuses on the social life of printed materials, placing the Dead’s print culture in cultural and political situ.
In the 1960s, a new generation of young people–products of the post-war baby boom who by then formed a sizable segment of the overall U.S. population–were bristling against convention and finding their voice. As the civil rights and worldwide independence movements achieved momentum and the “New Left” found ideological purchase, activists identified new means of sharing vital information through the creation of alternative publications and an underground press. The mainstream–or “overground”–press took notice:
The information officers of the New American Left have rediscovered an ancient political ally: print power. All over the country, radical and "movement" organizations have spawned their own print shops run by their own pressmen to churn out an increasing number of posters, pamphlets, handbills, and flyers. Whether it's to mobilize a march on Washington, explain the advantages of "Free Speech" for GIs, or advertise courses at an alternative university, the rebel presses are rolling. By the thousands, their folded-and-stapled brochures, decorated with crude graphics, are being given away at hastily set up campus tables or sold in the standard subculture outlets (Associated Press 1970).
Radical print shops popped up in the Bay Area and spread internationally, circulating a wide network of print material engaged with politics, art and literature, and prodigious social change. As revolutionary ideas spread, artists experimented with the expressive capacities of emergent print technologies, collectively crafting an unconventional and acrobatically imaginative graphic identity.
The exploratory, democratic, and liberatory attitude expressed in the print culture of the period was reflected across genres of artmaking, and was to be found, acutely and enduringly, in the music of and visual culture surrounding the Grateful Dead. This exhibition also features artifacts reflective of the band’s visual vernacular, born from the psychedelic vocabulary of the ‘60s and ‘70s and transformed, over time, into a distinctive brand and cultural touchstone. The band was formed at a moment of optimism amid radical upheaval in the Bay Area, and their visual language has transmitted the spirit of the period to new and nostalgic audiences across the decades that followed.
LOCATION: Dead Central, on the main level of McHenry Library
Since their start in the 1960s, the American band known as the Grateful Dead showed immense capacity for creating a sense of radical welcome, connecting with fans, fellow musicians, and many others who shared their interest in the creative possibilities of experimentation and improvisation. The Thread that Runs so True draws on a variety of archival collections at UC Santa Cruz to explore the many threads running between the Grateful Dead and other artists, thinkers, and supporters who also have left behind archival traces within the archives held at UC Santa Cruz.
At UC Santa Cruz's University Library, the band’s papers keep company with musical scores of avant garde composers, recorded interviews of jazz and rock innovators, photographs and papers of Black Panther Party members, scholarly studies on sound, and even the writings of a certain gonzo journalist. A look into some of these other archives reveals the threads that run between the Grateful Dead and a diversity of artists, authors, journalists, and activists whose archives also have their homes at UC Santa Cruz today.
February 2, 2020 - December 22, 2022
LOCATION: Dead Central, on the main level of McHenry Library
Any reference to the Grateful Dead, perhaps the world’s most iconic improvisational band, can easily conjure images in one’s mind of psychedelic tie-dyed clothes, dancing bears, and rose-garlanded skeletons. But just as they defied expectations with their music, the band also inspired in their listeners a diverse visual landscape in response to their songs.
(card sent to the Grateful Dead from Dead Heads Japan, with art by Miki Saito)
Love on Haight brings together posters, photography, and ephemera to explore the revolution in print culture, music, and social change in 1967, the Summer of Love. Included are documents from the Grateful Dead Archive, photographs from Ruth-Marion Baruch’s 1967 Haight-Ashbury series, and selections from the Library’s exceptionally rich holdings in alternative publications from this time period: a variety of newspapers and magazines, comic books, literary journals, broadsides, and political tracts. Supplementing these sources are audiovisual components – films about the Summer of Love, snippets of performances and, of course, music.
This exhibit explored the art that documented, celebrated, and inspired the Grateful Dead and their fans.
The land on which we gather is the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, comprised of the descendants of indigenous people taken to missions Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista during Spanish colonization of the Central Coast, is today working hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands and heal from historical trauma.
The land acknowledgement used at UC Santa Cruz was developed in partnership with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band Chairman and the Amah Mutsun Relearning Program at the UCSC Arboretum.
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