Ken Kesey’s school bus has returned to San Francisco after six decades. It anchors a new show honoring the Grateful Dead. Painted in wild hues and driven coast to coast on a mind-bending trip, the bus now sits at the heart of Forever Grateful/Golden Gate Park, which launched on Saturday, Sept. 5, per OregonLive.com.
The show also displays Jerry Garcia’s BMW, still in perfect shape and never before shown to the public. These two pieces anchor an experience that plunges visitors into the colors, sounds, and scenes of the movement that bloomed in San Francisco during the 1960s.
“This invites people to communicate and connect around art, music, and activism,” said Kelly Harris, executive director of the Haight Street Art Center, which organized the exhibition, according to OregonLive.com. “In this day and age, when we need something to bridge community, we know that this space allows for that to happen and Furthur is the portal.”
Kesey and the Merry Pranksters rode the bus, called Furthur, across the country in 1964 on a psychedelic journey involving art, music and mind-altering drugs. He bought it with money from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Tom Wolfe recounted that groundbreaking road trip in his 1968 bestseller, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. When they got back to California, Kesey shared what he’d learned at a string of parties at his home in the hills above Stanford University that became known as the “acid tests,” per News10 ABC.
A local bar band called The Warlocks played at those parties. They transformed into the Grateful Dead. Formed in 1965, the band became inseparable from San Francisco and its movement. Members lived in a Victorian in the Haight and later became a big part of 1967’s Summer of Love.
“This entire exhibit, it’s a very layered story of the Grateful Dead and their influence, their phenomenon, and their impact on communities, on society, on people, and how their legacy still lives on,” said Renee de Cossio, director of exhibitions at the Haight Street Art Center, per KQED.
Actors with the Third Rail Projects will guide visitors through part of the exhibit. This includes a dark tunnel full of mirrors that leads into booths where they will start conversations with the audience. They’ll then lead small groups to experience a liquid light show — a 1960s art technique that mixes liquids of different densities in watch glasses and projects colorful patterns onto every space of a room.
“You might go with the people that you came with, or you might get packaged with a couple other folks that you didn’t know, and you’ll then unpack the experience with each other and have a conversation with a stranger that you wouldn’t have had otherwise,” said Edward Rice, associate managing director at Third Rail Projects, per the Business Journal.
The exhibit runs through Oct. 25. It will also feature photographs from the band’s many concerts in Golden Gate Park and a screen-printing station where visitors can create their own art. The show will help launch an effort to restore the now-dilapidated Furthur bus, which got its name after a typo on its destination sign.
The vehicle was kept on the Kesey family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon. It was last seen in public at Woodstock in 1969.