Bill Graham Presents #216

Name/Title

Bill Graham Presents #216

Type of Print

Lithograph

Collection

Rock Posters Collection

Made/Created

Artist

Singer, David

Manufacturer

Tea Lautrec Litho

Date made

1969

Notes

Artist's Gender: M

Dimensions

Height

20-1/2 in

Width

13-3/4 in

Copyright

Copyright Holder

Graham, Bill

Copyright Date

1969

Interpretative Labels

Label Type

Artist Bio

Label

After leaving the Navy and settling in San Francisco, David Singer supported himself with odd jobs and began experimenting with graphic art and collage. In 1968, he was encouraged by a fellow poster artist to visit the office of Bill Graham, the director of the Fillmore West concert venue, where he was offered a job. Singer’s work was a significant shift from the work of previous artists because his designs were more simple and readable, incorporating collage techniques and surrealist influences. Of all the artists, Singer produced the largest body of work for the Fillmore, creating sixty posters between 1969 and 1971.

Label Type

Object Label

Label

Prior to his involvement with the Fillmore West, David Singer was experimenting with collage art: physically cutting, pasting, and arranging images together to create scenes with symbolic imagery. He used these skills in this poster, where he’s created a collage of a human anatomical figure running on top of mushrooms, with a backdrop of a galaxy contained within a stone archway. It’s the sort of scene you might see in a strange dream; Singer himself described this poster as having “...a certain LSD mystique.”