The West Coast rock poster art of the 1960s was a phenomena then, and are collector's items now. Poster designers became famous in the art world -or some of the men did. Women who designed and printed psychedelic op art posters were overlooked, considered eye candy who were obviously just assisting the men who really created art. One of these was Donna Wallace-Cohen, then named Donna Herrick, who couldn't even get her name in a photo caption about the art. In San Francisco, she created posters for concerts by the Grateful Dead and The Doors, commissioned by the Love Conspiracy Commune. She also painted topless waitresses at Whisky A-Go-Go. Not paintings of them, but the actual waitresses.
Wallace-Cohen’s next poster for the Love Conspiracy Commune advertised an evening at Winterland with the Grateful Dead, billed as The First Annual Love Circus, hence the psychedelic circus tent and giraffes in the center of Wallace-Cohen’s complex composition. “I think you had to be stoned to see it,” she says. “The colors were printed wrong,” she adds, “which made the lettering harder to read, but that also made it better.”
Today, Wallace-Cohen’s poster for this show is probably her most prized. A copy of the poster is owned by the Achenbach Foundation, the print-collection and paper-conservation arm of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and it marks the first time the Grateful Dead performed at Winterland, making it a favorite of Deadheads and rock-poster collectors alike. But on the night of March 3, 1967, the show almost didn’t go on when a Haight-Ashbury group called the Diggers picketed the show over the then-high price of $3.50 per ticket. For a while, the Dead refused to take the stage until enough of the Diggers had been admitted into the former ice rink for free.
The Diggers were apparently onto something when it came to their distrust of the Love Conspiracy Commune. Two months later to the day, San Francisco’s finest arrested eight people associated with the commune at a home in the city’s tony Pacific Heights neighborhood—it turned out to be a front for a meth lab.
Wallace-Cohen eventually left San Francisco, but kept making art, which evolved over time. Read the adventures of an underrated artist who deserves notice at Collectors Weekly.