Psychedelic, Man

June 26, 2007 — -- It was 40 years ago when hippies brought counterculture to San Francisco and America, ushering in a time of free expression, free experimentation and free love. But along with all the sex, drugs and rock and roll, there was art — the visual representation of the emotion, energy and ethos of this era.

Now, a new exhibition of psychedelic art, appropriately titled "Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era," is on display at the Whitney Museum in New York City. It celebrates not only the art of the 1960s and '70s but also the spirit of these years.

"The exhibit is called 'Summer of Love' because it is based on art that was produced starting in the mid 1960s through the early 1970s, which deals with the aesthetic of psychedelia," said Stacey Goergen, an assistant curator at the Whitney Museum, in an interview with ABC News.

Broken down by medium, "Summer of Love" embraces the much-maligned paintings, drawings, films, graphic designs, music and even architecture of San Francisco, New York and London — the major hubs of that counterculture movement.

The exhibit purposefully calls these psychedelic creations works of art, holding them to the same standard as some of the more formal minimalist and contemporary art of the same period.

"This was a time and a period where there was a lot of creative innovation occurring, and yet, it's often overlooked in the canons of art history, in terms of being an important contribution to what was happening at that time," said Goergen.

"Yet, many of the things we live with … daily … now incorporate this psychedelic aesthetic, and we take that for granted because at the time, this was a very radical, very political movement."

Fed by civil unrest and social upheaval, psychedelic art reflected the instability of these years but also the wildly subversive ideas, beliefs and actions of the growing youth movement — hippies who broke all social norms, experimented with their sexuality and mind-altering drugs and, said Goergen, "transgressed everything that their more conservative parents believed in.