New exhibit honors the unsung women of rock poster art

In what seems to her like another lifetime, Donna Wallace-Cohen, a retired vice president of Bloomingdale’s in New York, was living on a houseboat in Sausalito in the ’60s, creating posters for rock concerts at the Whiskey a Go Go and Winterland in San Francisco for bands like the Doors and the Grateful Dead.

And now, some six decades after the psychedelic era that Wallace-Cohen looks back on as a distant memory from her hippie youth, she and more than 50 other women poster artists, including several from Marin County, are being celebrated in a major show, “Women of Rock Art: 1965 – 2023,” at the Haight Street Art Center in San Francisco.

“It blows me away,” the 85-year-old Mill Valley artist says. “This was so many lifetimes away for me.”

The exhibit, featuring more than 200 posters, handbills and flyers, was curated by Ben Marks, whose passion for rock music and rock posters was kindled when he was a student at San Rafael High School, graduating in 1973. He’s presenting the show as a tribute to the unsung women who have long been in the shadow of the famed “Big Five” ’60s poster artists: Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin and Wes Wilson.

“In the ’60s, when I first got interested in rock poster art, it was a real boys’ club,” Marks says.

“What I learned is that back in the day there were a surprising number of women doing this work, but they didn’t have as many opportunities as men, and since then the world has kind of forgotten about them. This show can’t do anything about giving women opportunities in the past, but I can do something about recognizing who was doing what, not just in the past but today.”

Wallace-Cohen’s best-known poster is one she created for a group called the Love Conspiracy Commune for a concert at Winterland with Moby Grape and the Grateful Dead.

“It’s the first poster with the words ‘Grateful Dead’ and ‘Winterland’ on it,” Marks says, “which is a big deal for collectors.”

That isn’t even the most distinctive thing about it. Wallace-Cohen, whose name in those days was Donna Herrick, misspelled Grateful Dead, leaving out the “e” in Grateful. No one noticed it for years until a relative in England pointed it out fairly recently.

“Maybe you have to be stoned to catch it,” she says, laughing.

Reaching into her memory bank, she remembers the night she and other artists covered the entire Winterland floor in fluorescent chalk.

“It was incredible,” she recalls. “Then people came in, danced on it and wiped it away.”

The show features several posters she did for Seattle rock shows produced by Matthew Katz, the controversial manager of the Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape and It’s a Beautiful Day.

After working for a decade in New York as corporate visual director for Bloomingdale’s, she returned to Marin in the ’90s, opening her own commercial design, illustration and photography company in Sausalito. Working out of her Mill Valley studio, she continues to make fine art that addresses social issues she cares about. Her work was recently in O’Hanlon Center for the Arts’ “Dualities” exhibit.

Coralie Russo

Like Wallace-Cohen, San Anselmo’s Coralie Russo began her career as a poster artist when she was living on a barge-turned-houseboat in Sausalito in the ’60s. A 1966 Redwood High grad, she was a 19-year-old art student when she was hired to do posters for the Ark, a legendary nightclub on the decommissioned ferryboat Charles Van Damme.

“They bought me all this silkscreen equipment and gave me a studio in the pilot house of the ferry,” she recalls. “My first poster was for a New Year’s Eve show, going from ’67 (the Summer of Love) to ’68. They were all silkscreened with hand-cut lettering. There were no computers then, and I didn’t even know about typesetting. We’d do small print runs in two or three colors and take the posters all around Sausalito and Mill Valley.”

“Coralie was doing posters designed to actually get people to the shows,” Marks says. “They weren’t just commemoratives or souvenirs. Her posters were out in the world to tell people these things were happening.”

Her most acclaimed poster was created for a two-night run at Gate Six in Sausalito by a band called Womb as well as the Santana Blues Band, the precursor of the Santana Band that would blow up nationally at Woodstock in 1969. Its centerpiece is an image of a crab with the dates of the shows listed, but no particular time. It just says “All Nite.” That poster is featured Paul Grushkin’s book “The Art of Rock: Posters from Presley to Punk,” which Marks calls “the bible of rock poster art.”

“I just feel like Coralie has been unrecognized forever and needs to have a little bit of credit,” says Fairfax poster collector Stephen Abramson, who contributed 20 vintage posters for the show. “For somebody who was that young to have that vision, I think she’s really important. She’s like the foundation of the whole thing.”

After moving to Sebastopol in 1969 with her husband, the late waterfront denizen Frank Russo, she made a living for 20 years designing and manufacturing jewelry. When the first Mac computers came out, she moved back to Marin and earned a degree in graphic design from the Academy of Art College. She’s been a graphic designer ever since, working for various design studios in Marin and San Francisco.

While living in Sebastopol, a belly dance class led to her learning to play the oud, a Middle Eastern stringed instrument. Married to world musician Vince Delgado, the 75-year-old performs with her husband in the Mid-East Tapestry Ensemble, a group that plays classical, popular and folk music from Middle Eastern countries.

Maggie Catfish

Once again, the Sausalito houseboat community figures into the work of Maggie Catfish, who began making posters for her boyfriend’s jug band in high school, a skill that came in handy when she was a member of the Redlegs, a popular houseboat band in the ’60s and ’70s founded by Joe Tate, who is still an active musician and a longtime host of the Blue Monday Jams at the Sausalito Cruising Club.

“Every time we had a gig I made a silkscreen poster and Joe and the gang would go around and put them up,” she recalls. “Somebody needed to do it.”

Now in her 70s and living in Novato, she sings, plays guitar, bass and ukulele, and still performs occasionally with Tate. These days, she’s been teaming with singer-songwriter Cici Dawn. Like the other women in this story, having her posters in the “Women of Rock Art” show has brought back memories of a time when her generation was breaking barriers in music and art. And now, all these decades later, women are finally being recognized for their role in it.

“I was like all the other hippies in the Summer of Love,” she says. “They were memorable times. It was an amazing time in my life.”

• Details: “Women of Rock Art: 1965 – 2023” is on display through April 14 at the Haight Street Art Center at 215 Haight St. in San Francisco. Hours: noon to 6 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays. Admission is free. For more information, go to haightstreetart.org.

Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net