Garcia exhibition

PRINTS and COLLAGES
by JERRY GARCIA and WAVY GRAVY
still on display athe October Gallery, lONDON, to Jan 26th
http://www.theoctobergallery.com/pr-wavy.htm

from Gallery site:
A special exhibition to mark the year's end will comprise work by two
American artists better known for their contributions in other fields - but
whose art provides direct insights both into their own lives and into the
fascinating years that saw the emergence of the American counter-culture.

Still best remembered today as the “voice of Woodstock” (both at the
original 1969 event and its 90s re-incarnation) Wavy Gravy has charted an
uncompromisingly individual and eccentric course through the history of
post-war America. His personal pilgrimage, spanning the hectic years from
the 50’s Beat generation to the 90’s X-generation, has seen him operate, by
turns, as a raconteur, a poet, an improvisational humourist, a Hog Farmer,
a Merry Prankster, an environmentalist, the philanthropic founder of Seva,
a group dedicated to helping underprivileged children abroad, a political
activist, and much else besides. Throughout these many and varied
metamorphoses— Wavy has always been, first and foremost, a clown, spreading
laughter and insight liberally on all sides.
One facet of his polymath personality often overlooked, is that since the
Greenwich Village of the early Sixties — around the time that Bob Dylan
borrowed his typewriter to write A Hard Rain Gonna Fall— Wavy Gravy has
also practised the art of collage. Many of the prints resulting from the
collages made throughout his helter-skelter years of moving from the East
to the West Coast and beyond, chronicle and portray some of the friends and
legends who shared his journey; from Lenny Bruce, his one-time manager and
always his friend, to Leadbelly, Bessie Smith, John Lee Hooker and other
great names of the Blues period. Wavy Gravy’s cleverly assembled
compositions denote a shrewd eye for significant detail, treating their
subjects with characteristic humour and in a light-heartedly subversive
manner. Though employing a variety of different themes, taken as a whole,
the collages and prints in this show create a virtual pantheon of blues
musicians, who, captured complete with wings, haloes and other symbols of
sanctification, are here invested with their rightful immortality, and
justly celebrated as the icons that we always knew they were. Besides
showing work in this, his first-ever exhibition in London, Wavy will also
participate in a series of events, workshops and charitable appearances at
venues such as the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.

To complement the collages of Wavy Gravy and examine still further the
broad theme of the American counter-culture, the October Gallery will also
be showing limited edition screen prints of art by another Sixties legend,
the former leader of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, who died in 1995. As
well as being the central pillar of the one American band to achieve actual
cult status, Jerry was also a writer and an artist of some merit. This
exhibition will be the first opportunity for London audiences to see at
first hand a variety of prints on diverse themes taken from Garcia’s
original work. Seen in conjunction with his friend Wavy Gravy’s series of
Blues musicians, the prints provide a unique insight into the colourful,
quixotic and hugely inventive world that flowered in America from the 50’s
onwards and that was powered by a deeply personal search for new forms of
self-expression—as, here, so beautifully illustrated by Garcia’s own prints.