Beat Artists on Acid - Illustrated Lecture by Michael Pearce

Sat., November 21st – 2:00 PM – SMALL THEATER

BEAT ARTISTS ON ACID – Illustrated Lecture by artist & scholar Michael Pearce

Step into the smoke-filled, mattress-strewn dark rooms of 669 Oak Street—the Lower Haight Victorian flat that served as the headquarters for a coven of artistic rebels. Years before the 1960s hippy revolution exploded into the mainstream, an underground network of brilliant poets, heretic upstarts, and avant-garde painters were already using pure peyote cactus to shatter the boundaries of American conformity in San Francisco.

Forget the sanitized, media-packaged myth of the "beatnik." These creators despised the term. They considered themselves serious aesthetic gladiators, waging a spiritual war against a sanitized society.

Prepare to Uncover:

The Oak Street Beats: Enter the wild, law-defying nexus where legendary assemblage artists of the Batman Gallery rubbed night-draped shoulders with Dave Haselwood’s radical Auerhahn Press poets.

Alan Russo’s Forbidden Smoothies: The mind-bending story of the thickly muscled peyote gatherer who tossed raw cactus buttons into a kitchen blender, serving up a divine, psychic sacrament to the underground elite.

The Battle for ‘Real Reality’: Dive into the fierce philosophy of a young Dion Wright, who argued that peyote wasn't some cheap, hallucinated trick—it was a nuclear blast of raw revelation that made "reality getting all the more real."

Brace yourself for a wild trip through police raids, institutional censorship, and the pure, unadulterated birth of the West Coast psychedelic underground.

Michael J. Pearce, Ph.D., MFA, is a British-born figurative painter, art critic, and renegade scholar whose electrifying work has blown open the gates surrounding psychedelic, visionary, and transgressive art. Dr. Pearce isn't interested in safe, predictable institutional art trends; instead, he champions the raw, honest, and explosive visual movements exploding from the counterculture to smash cold, academic modernism. A true champion of the underground, Pearce serves on the board of the vanguard Psychedelic Arts and Culture Trust (PACT). He is presently writing a definitive history of psychedelic art, mapping a law-defying lineage of artists who utilized altered states to bare the deep, unadulterated mechanics of the human consciousness.

His research isn’t confined to archives. Pearce lives on the front lines of art preservation. He played a real-world, detective’s role in tracking down and recovering artist Dion Wright's long-lost 12-foot-tall epic masterpiece, the Taxonomic Mandala from a barn in Washington State - a legendary painting that once stood at the center of the vortex of California's 1960s psychedelic counterculture. Whether he is deconstructing the political machinery of the art establishment in his brilliant columns for MutualArt or exploring neuroaesthetics and the psychedelic sublime in his foundational book Art in the Age of Emergence (2015), Pearce is on an uncompromising mission. He is dragooning visionary art out of the fringes and cementing it where it belongs: at the absolute center of serious global art discourse.

Tickets: $15 advance / $20 at the door.

Doors open at 1:30 PM, event at 2 PM at The 418 Project, 155 South River Street, downtown Santa Cruz at the Dragons Gate.

Safety protocols will be in compliance with local guidelines at the time of showing.