Alton Kelley Artist Created Psychedelic Posters for Rock Dies

Kelley died Sunday at his home in Petaluma, Calif., according to publicist Jennifer Gross. The cause was complications from osteoporosis.

With his creative partner Stanley Mouse, Kelley helped launch a poster art revolution in the mid-1960s, turning out vividly colored works for concerts at the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium, where Jimi Hendrix, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service were among the headliners.

“Kelley was one of the first to see it coming, the rise of the psychedelic era in San Francisco," Paul Grushkin, who wrote “The Art of Rock, Posters From Presley to Punk" (1987), said this week. “He was a pioneer."

Using images inspired by vintage prints and lettering that flows like smoke, Kelley and Mouse designed graphics now considered emblems of the psychedelic age. The best known of them all is a skull and roses design they created for the Grateful Dead.