OAF Talk | Field Trip: Psychedelic Solution, 1986-1995

This year’s OAF New York panel discussion will take a look back on the legendary gallery Psychedelic Solution operated in New York’s West Village from 1986 to 2004. It was the first exhibition space devoted to historical and contemporary expressions of psychedelic art. Owned and run by Jacaeber Kastor, who grew up in the counterculture environment of 1960s Berkeley, the gallery expanded the notion of what psychedelic art might include and challenged the hierarchies of the New York art world. In addition to solo shows of work by artists such as Wes Wilson, Joe Coleman, H.R. Giger, Robert Crumb, Paul Mavrides, and Cristobal Gonzalez, Kastor mounted exhibitions of blotter-acid and tattoo art and hot-rod model designs. At opening parties, lines to get into the gallery often stretched down the street, a magnitude of people, Kastor has written, “more commonly seen at nightclubs.” These events were celebrations of the art and community-building events, and regular coverage by MTV News brought Psychedelic Solution’s offerings to a national audience.

The OAF Curated Space Field Trip: Psychedelic Solution, 1986-1995, curated by Fred Tomaselli, draws on Kastor’s extensive collection, and this panel will examine the gallery’s formative years, its legacy, and Kastor’s singular championing of psychedelic art.

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Jacaeber Kastor owned and ran the legendary Psychedelic Solution Gallery in New York’s West Village from 1986 to 2004, where he exhibited the work of numerous artists, including Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Robert Williams, and Mark Mothersbaugh. A correspondent for the British magazine Zigzag in the 1980s, Kastor also wrote for OFFtheWALL in the 1990s and, most recently, for Juxtapoz. His extensive collection of psychedelic art is the subject of the exhibition Field Trip: Psychedelic Solution, 1986–1995, on view during the 2022 Outsider Art Fair, in New York.

Fred Tomaselli is a New York–based artist whose paintings draw on art historical sources as well as Eastern and Western traditions. His work has most recently been the subject of exhibitions at the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE (2019), Oceanside Museum of Art, California (2018), White Cube, London (2017), and the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio (2016), and has been included in international biennials, including Sydney (2010), Prospect 1 (2008), Site Santa Fe (2004), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2004). He is the curator of Field Trip: Psychedelic Solution, 1986–1995, a special exhibition for the 2022 Outsider Art Fair, in New York.

Dan Nadel is curator-at-large for the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis. His most recent books include Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence 1945–1976 (Bad Dimension Press, 2020) and It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940–1980 (New York Review Comics, 2021), which accompanied his exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago Comics, 1960 to Now. Nadel is currently working on the biography of Robert Crumb.

Nicole Rudick is the author of What Is Now Known Was Once Only Forgotten: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle (Siglio), which was published in February. She is the editor of a new edition of Gary Panter’s comic Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise (New York Review Comics, 2021) and of The Writer’s Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from “The Paris Review” Interviews (Paris Review Editions, 2018). Her writing has appeared most recently in The New York Review of Books, T Magazine, and Bookforum. She was managing editor of The Paris Review for nearly a decade.