Still best remembered today as the “voice of Woodstock” (both at the original 1969 event and its 90s re-incarnation) Wavy Gravy has charted an uncompromisingly individual and eccentric course through the history of post-war America. His personal pilgrimage, spanning the hectic years from the 50’s Beat generation to the 90’s X-generation, has seen him operate, by turns, as a raconteur, a poet, an improvisational humourist, a Hog Farmer, a Merry Prankster, an environmentalist, the philanthropic founder of Seva, a group dedicated to helping underprivileged children abroad, a political activist, and much else besides. Throughout these many and varied metamorphoses— Wavy has always been, first and foremost, a clown, spreading laughter and insight liberally on all sides.
One facet of his polymath personality often overlooked, is that of the artist. Since the Greenwich Village of the early Sixties — around the time that Bob Dylan borrowed his typewriter to write A Hard Rain Gonna Fall— Wavy Gravy has created many collages. Many of these collages, made during his helter-skelter years of moving from the East to the West Coast and beyond, chronicle and portray some of the friends and legends who shared his journey; from Lenny Bruce, his one-time manager and always his friend, to Leadbelly, Bessie Smith, John Lee Hooker and other great names of the Blues period. Wavy Gravy’s cleverly assembled compositions denote a shrewd eye for significant detail, treating their subjects with characteristic humour and in a light-heartedly subversive manner. Though employing a variety of different themes, taken as a whole, the collages and prints in this show create a virtual pantheon of blues musicians, who, captured complete with wings, haloes and other symbols of sanctification, are here invested with their rightful immortality, and justly celebrated as the icons that we always knew they were. Besides showing work in this, his first-ever exhibition in London, Wavy will also participate in a series of events, workshops and charitable appearances at venues such as the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.

The Art of Jerry Garcia

Butterfly Study, Jerry Garcia, Print of original Watercolour 35 x 25 cm.
£1,875, unframed.

To complement the collages of Wavy Gravy and examine still further the broad theme of the American counter-culture, the October Gallery will also be showing limited edition screen prints of art by another Sixties legend, the former leader of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, who died in 1995. As well as being the central pillar of the one American band to achieve real cult status, Jerry was also a writer and an artist of some merit. This exhibition will be the first opportunity for London audiences to see at first hand a variety of prints on diverse themes taken from Garcia’s original work. Seen in conjunction with his friend Wavy Gravy’s series of Blues musicians, the prints provide a unique insight into the colourful, quixotic and hugely inventive world that flowered in America from the 50’s onwards and that was powered by a deeply personal search for new forms of self-expression—as, here, so beautifully illustrated by Garcia’s own prints.
Further depth was added to the Double Scoop! exhibition by the addition of a set of original photographs of the two from the collection of Lisa Law, one of the outstanding photographers who documented the period.

The "Double Scoop!" exhibition takes place in Association with Vince & Gloria Di Biase of the
VinGlo Gallery, San Rafael, California
and is supported by the generosity of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream.