UC Santa Cruz will celebrate the public opening of the Grateful Dead Archive at the University Library on Friday, June 29, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.
The event will take place on the south lawn of McHenry Library and feature music from Moonalice, a renowned Northern California band known for its extended musical improvisations and strong ties to the Grateful Dead.
Admission is free, and light refreshments will be offered to the public.
Visitors will be able to explore the Archive’s inaugural exhibit--A Box of Rain: Archiving the Grateful Dead Phenomenon--in the Brittingham Family Foundation Dead Central, the new exhibition space in McHenry Library devoted to the Grateful Dead Archive.
Curated by Grateful Dead Archivist Nicholas Meriwether, the exhibit showcases major treasures from the collection, ranging from the iconic “Skeleton & Roses” poster created by Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley, to fan decorated envelopes for mail order ticket requests, to Jerry Garcia’s annotated lyric sheets.
The Grateful Dead Archive has been the focus of a great deal of attention since 2008, when UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal, University Librarians, and Mickey Hart and Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead announced that the band would donate its archives to the campus at a press conference held in San Francisco’s historic Fillmore Auditorium.
The Archive documents the Dead’s remarkable creative activity and influence in contemporary music history from 1965 to 1995, including the phenomena of the Deadheads, its extensive social network of devoted fans, and the band’s highly unusual and successful musical business ventures.
Researchers interested in cultural history, the sixties, counterculture, and the many other areas related to the Grateful Dead phenomenon, will now have access to original source materials in the UCSC Library’s Special Collections.
McHenry Library and its south lawn are open to the campus community and to the public; it is a smoke free environment. Parking for the event will be available in both the Performing Arts and Hahn Services lots. Temporary parking permits may be purchased for $3 from attendants in these lots.
For further information on the Grateful Dead Archive, including directions to the opening, go to the University Library web site.
