“Saying Goodbye to A Summer of Love”

How do we suck the meat off of the last of our summer bones? After all, summer is almost gone. At the Museum of Fine Arts’ “Summer of Love: Photography and Graphic Design” exhibit (lasting from July 6, 2017 to October 22, 2017), summer’s inevitable nostalgia is plastered across its walls in psychedelic posters and portrait-based images that depict moments of wild music, youth culture, and Haight-Ashbury as a mecca for the counter-culture and all of the creativity that came out of it.

In 1967, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury presided as the place where kids came to live cheaply, freely disobeying society’s musts by embracing hippie-dom, culminating in the famously named Summer of Love. Here, thousands of youths met, as notorious LSD-head Timothy Leary urged, to “turn on, tune in, and drop out” in flamboyant rebellion against society’s straight-laced norms.

The exhibit is a sneak peek backwards into 1967, where posters influenced by the billowing curves of Art Nouveau artists slide into the work of poster-makers like Wes Wilson, illustrating yet another example of our inescapable desire to revisit the past while imprinting the present with our own designs.

American photographer Herb Greene pops up throughout the exhibit; his iconic photograph of the Grateful Dead depicts a Bob Weir who looks just about fifteen. The urgency that drives us to define ourselves, throw caution to the wind, and in abandonment rediscover our liminal identities, peeks out through Weir’s sleepy, youthful smile. Clad in dark skinny jeans, pointed boots, and double-breasted pea coats, in Greene’s snaps, the Grateful Dead could be any fashion-conscious quintet of musicians today, posing against the backdrop of a Haight-Ashbury now drastically changed by gentrification.

The exhibit begs the question: where does our appreciation of the past take us? Can we relive moments of exuberant change while remaining in the all-encompassing demands of the present? How is nostalgia at once a tool and a dagger? At the end of the summer, we find ourselves languidly waiting for change, looking back at our recent past all the while anticipating its irrepressible end. Nostalgia, it seems, is infinite.

–Camille Dourmashkin-Cagol