“We saw that skeleton and said, ‘This says Grateful Dead all over it - we have to use this,’” Mouse recalls. This particular edition, from 1913, featured illustrations by British artist Edmund Joseph (sometimes E.J.) Sullivan, and one in particular spoke to them: a black-and-white drawing of a skeleton surrounded by roses, with a crown of them atop its head. Back to the library they went, and in the stacks, they found The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a collection of 11th century poems by the Persian writer. That year, the duo was recruited to make a poster for the Dead’s September 1966 show at the Avalon Ballroom. For inspiration, the two would sometimes drop into the San Francisco Public Library to peruse rare art and poster books. By 1966, artists Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley, two San Francisco-based artists, had formed a partnership and were already tapped into the Dead world. Untangling the saga of that illustration is nearly as long and strange a trip as the Dead’s saga itself. He snapped it up, and now that piece (titled “A Skeleton Amid Roses”) can be seen publicly, for the first time in more than three decades, in “Field Trip: Psychedelic Solution, 1986-1995,” part of the Outsider Art Fair at the Metropolitan House in New York. About 30 years ago, artist, curator and art collector Jacaeber Kastor was checking out a gallery auction and came across the nearly century-old ink drawing that served as the basis of the Dead’s logo and album art. Anyone perusing a new psychedelic-era artwork exhibit in New York is bound to pause along the way and think, “Wait, isn’t that a Grateful Dead album cover?”Īnd they would be partly correct.
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