Pieces

The Zeitgeist
Posters for Market Street bus shelters and kiosks, San Francisco, 2017

The Zeitgeist was a series of posters installed at 36 bus shelters and kiosks on San Francisco’s Market Street from February-June 2017. As part of a regional 50^th anniversary celebration of the Summer of Love, the San Francisco Arts Commission engaged Kate Haug, Sarah Hotchkiss, and me to reexamine this historic event through a contemporary lens for its annual Art on Market Poster Series. We also created a zine and held a panel discussion at the California Historical Society in connection with the project.

I wanted to place the Summer of Love in a larger context of radical activism and experimentation of the 1960s. My project explored the intersection of political and social utopian ideas that drew people to San Francisco: struggles and celebrations of conflict and liberation that were linked by a foundational critique of capitalism and social conformity, and the questioning of America’s obsession with success and materialism.

I spent the fall of 2016 researching the archives at UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, and San Francisco’s GLTB Historical Society to unearth images of the emergent Black Panther Party; the Diggers, an anarchist art troupe that was a fixture of the Haight-Ashbury; the Vanguard, an early LGBT rights group based in the Tenderloin and a number of other significant political actions that informed the culture of 1967 San Francisco.

https://settlersandnomads.com/deborah-aschheims-zeitgeist-summer-love/

I am grateful for many people who helped with and supported this project:
Carli Bjerke, Patrick Miller, Kate Haug, Sarah Hotchkiss, Christine Steiner, Doug O’Connor, Rev Adrian Ravarour, Ph.D., Joey Plaster, Alex Barrows, Joanna Black at the GLBT Historical Society, James A. Eason, Michael M. Lange and Lorna K. Kirwin at The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, Elisabeth Remak-Honnef, PhD, and Luisa Haddad at Special Collections and Archives, McHenry Library, University of California, Santa Cruz, Steve MacLeod, Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries, Eric Thiermann, Robert Sharrad and Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books, Violet Redl, Tom McGauley, Kathleen Cleaver, Max Grogan, Chuck Gould, Eric Noble, Paul Richards, Pilar Perez, Lisa Mezzacappa and John Finkbeiner, Jody Zellen.