Beats on both coasts were finding vibrancy at the margins of American society, embracing African-Beat Culture, American culture, Asian philosophy, particularly Zen, mind expanding drugs, and the detritus of the street. Through over 30 special additions to the exhibition, San Francisco's seminal contributions to Beat culture are spotlighted in the de Young Museum's showing, making the presentation here a San Francisco celebration by a San Francisco institution. Mr. Burgard has added previously unexhibited material from Bay Area museum and private collections, as well as an introductory section that provides an increased historical and contextual framework for the exhibition. Topics and the display of original objects or works of art that amplify them in these galleries reflect the tenor of the times. It's a Long Way to Alabama deals with race and civil rights.
Sexuality is addressed through publications that discuss and embrace alternative lifestyles.
The developing influence of television as a vehicle to both reflect and shape culture is recalled by a vintage 1949 console set playing reruns of the McCarthy hearings. The San Francisco section of the exhibition chronicles the flowering of the San Francisco renaissance from Allen Ginsberg's first public reading of Howl in 1955 to the phenomenon of North Beach and the Haight Ashbury in the mid 1960s. Artists Jay DeFeo, Bruce Conner, Jess, Wally Hedrick, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Michael McClure worked in multiple media, including painting, poetry, drawing, assemblage, collage, film, photography, and graphic design. The centerpiece of these galleries is DeFeo's monumental and iconic painting The Rose , which she worked and reworked in her Fillmore Street studio from 1958 to 1966, using over a ton of paint in the process. Badly deteriorated and hidden from view for decades, the radial abstract oil painting was recently restored by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Art Institute.