When a number of social and political forces converged 40 years ago — frustration with an endless war, growing awareness of racial inequality, a rising middle class, and the dissemination of a magic substance called lysergic acid diethylamide — something happened to culture that, by all accounts, you just had to be there for.

That youthquake, centered in San Francisco and turned fab in London and urban in New York, has proved problematic historically precisely because it was predicated on being there. Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era at the Whitney Museum of American Art finally offers the first credible survey of the period's visual topography. The exhibition delivers a sourcebook of visionary artistic practices that have been consistently excised from aesthetic discourse because they run contrary to the academy — and even now resist an institutional setting.

This exhibition was originally organized for the Tate Liverpool by Christoph Grunenberg, whose work with contemporary artists such as Fred Tomaselli and assume vivid astro focus clearly informs his selection of '60s artworks. The summer show at the Whitney Museum is a maximalist freak-out, a nonhierarchical display of populism, and its curatorial openness allows such definitive masterworks as Abdul Mati Klarwein's A Grain of Sand and Isaac Abrams' All Things Are One Thing to come to light alongside works by Lucas Samaras and Jimi Hendrix. With so many young artists currently taking up the visual strategies of this era, these relics of the past gain new importance as breathtaking illuminations of the present.

Taking psychedelic at its literal meaning as mind-expanding, the current artistic generation employs a hybrid style to achieve optimal effect. The tendencies toward the biomorphic, Technicolor, synchronistic, synaesthetic, improvisational, and experiential, which have emerged out of the rubble of ‘60s acid-drenched radicalisms, extend beyond fine art to the freak-folk and nu-rave scenes. Among new psychedelic voyagers, there is not only a strong connection to music but also a general fluidity between mediums.

The most prominent pictorial alchemists today — Hisham Bharoocha, Jeremy Blake, Bjorn Copeland, dearraindrop, Jim Drain, Amy Gartrell, Vidya Gastaldon, Alex Grey, Frankie Martin, Paper Rad, Erik Parker, Ara Peterson, Justin Samson, and Fred Tomaselli — move easily among funky sculpture, homemade craft, trippy drawings, visionary paintings, optic graphic design, hypnotic video, obsessive installation, and (in almost every case) a prevailing fascination with the hallucinogenic properties of collage. Most importantly, however, is the ability of these practitioners to rework recently passé ‘60s tropes — expanded cinema, light shows, retina-searing color schemes, alternative psychological realms, stoner doodles, and hippie customizations — to offer subsequent generations a direct, unmediated access to the imagination that has been too long absent from fine art practices.

-CM