Family Dog

There was a rock-inspired artistic flowering in San Francisco in the mid-1960s, and Chet Helms and The Family Dog Presents were at the heart of the counterculture revolution. Chet migrated from Texas with Janis Joplin, became manager of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and produced a series of weekly dance concerts at San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom. The psychedelic Family Dog posters and handbills created to promote those shows were collected at the time, but no one could have foreseen the timeless value and ongoing cultural significance of the works. Indeed, the 160-plus Family Dog posters that once plastered the rainbow-painted walls of Haight-Ashbury are today enshrined in such prestigious art institutions as The Louvre, Britain’s Tate Modern Museum, and New York’s Whitney Museum.