Yarra Ranges Regional Museum brings American and Australian music posters from the National Gallery to Lilydale with Enjoy This Trip: The Art of Music Posters opening 13 December.
“The musicians were turning up their amplifiers to the point where they were blowing out your eardrums. I did the equivalent with the eyeballs.” – Victor Moscoso
It’s 1967 in San Francisco and you’re stumbling down the street at 2am after a particularly consciousness-expanding evening at the Fillmore.
Your pupils are the size of dinner plates. The Grateful Dead have just melted your face off for three hours straight. You reach out to steady yourself against a telephone pole and suddenly you’re staring at the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in your entire life.
It’s a poster. But it’s not just any poster. The letters are undulating like snakes made of melted rainbow candy. You squint. The text is advertising next week’s show—Jefferson Airplane.
You look left. You look right. The coast is clear. You peel it off the pole, fold it carefully into your jacket, and carry it home like contraband treasure. This poster will outlive the Summer of Love. It will outlive the whole damn decade. 50-odd years from now, collectors will pay thousands of dollars for it.
Enjoy This Trip: The Art of Music Posters
- 13 December 2025 to 22 February 2026
- Yarra Ranges Regional Museum, 35-37 Castella Street, Lilydale
- Open Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 4pm
- Free entry
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.
View this post on Instagram
That’s the world Ben Friedman understood better than anyone. The San Francisco poster dealer spent years watching hippies systematically strip telephone poles clean. While promoters like Bill Graham couldn’t understand why anyone would want posters from shows that had already finished, Friedman quietly bought their entire inventories for pocket change. Fifty cents per poster. A dollar retail. By 1978, he’d accumulated the largest stash of psychedelic concert posters on the planet, which he eventually sold to Australia’s National Gallery.
Now that collection is coming to Lilydale. Over 500 posters spanning the wild experimental years of the sixties through to the new wave era of the early eighties. Yarra Ranges Regional Museum opens Enjoy This Trip: The Art of Music Posters on 13 December.
When music posters stopped making sense
The exhibition spans two decades of experimental design from the 1960s through the 1980s, tracking how concert promotion evolved from straightforward announcements into kaleidoscopic visual statements. At the heart of the collection sits that acquisition the National Gallery made back in 1978 from Friedman’s Postermat shop on Columbus Avenue, documenting an era when poster artists pioneered an entirely new visual language.
Friedman ran what was probably the world’s largest purveyor of psychedelic rock posters, buying up entire inventories from legendary promoters Bill Graham and Chet Helms, when they couldn’t fathom why anyone would want yesterday’s advertising. Graham allegedly told him: I sell them to you for 50 cents, you sell them for a dollar. The math was simple but the vision was profound. These weren’t just advertisements anymore, they were documents of a cultural revolution happening in real time.
The collection includes works from the San Francisco Big Five, the informal collective of poster artists who pioneered psychedelic visual language. Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley developed a style that matched the intensity of the music they promoted, using vibrating colour combinations, warped typography and Art Nouveau influences filtered through LSD-fuelled experimentation. Their posters for Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Doors and Janis Joplin became as iconic as the bands themselves.
Beyond San Francisco
While the Big Five dominated the San Francisco scene, the exhibition also explores parallel movements in London, Detroit and Vancouver, alongside Australian contributions to music poster design. The collection includes work by Australian artist Paul Worstead, whose posters for Mental As Anything captured the satirical, art school sensibility of Sydney’s new wave scene in the early eighties.
Curator Leanne Santoro has organised the National Gallery touring exhibition to highlight how these posters drew from diverse historical sources including Art Nouveau, collage techniques and Pop Art, creating a visual language that captured the experimental spirit of the times. The typography alone tells the story of an era that prioritised aesthetic experience over functional communication, where concert information became secondary to creating an immersive visual trip.
For more information, head here.
This article was made in partnership with Yarra Ranges Regional Museum.
