Sture and Charlotte Johannesson: "Hash Girl" and Galleri Cannabis

Dow Shalt Not Kill! U.S.A - Union of
Stoned Anarchists (Sture Johannesson). 

At the Oakland Museum of CA (OCMA)'s Gallery of California History, I spied an amazing poster featuring an image of LBJ surrounded by corporate logos and phrases and, subtly in the margins, cannabis plants. 

Some research revealed the title of the 1967 poster is "Dow Shalt Not Kill! U.S.A" and it's attributed to the Union of Stoned Anarchists and the Swedish artist Sture Johannesson.   

According to the Oak Tree Review, Johannesson’s psychedelic posters "scandalised the progressive Swedish society of the sixties. His defence of psychotropic substances, used as a critique of State control, provoked censorship in both public and private institutions. For more than twenty years, his poster production served to denounce that the way in which society builds and transmits its patterns of authority is ultimately more hallucinatory than the effects of any drug."

When interviewed by Swedish magazine FIB Aktuellt in 1967, Johannesson "enthusiastically spoke about his use of psychedelics and cannabis. For instance, as he discusses an elaborate marker drawing with the reporters, Johannesson admits he created it under the influence of hashish, LSD and mescaline. 'That’s why it’s so great,' he says of the drawing."

Appropriately enough, the interview took place at “Galleri Cannabis,” an art gallery and studio space in Malmö, Sweden, which Johannesson founded in 1965 with his wife Charlotte Johannesson, also an artist. The gallery "functioned as a meeting point and production house for the self-styled underground." 

Johannesson's poster "Turn on the Institutions" has the message The Kingdom is Within You; another is titled "Art Crisis! A Free & High Government!" But his most notorious poster "Freedom on the Barricades II," originally titled "Revolution Means Revolutionary Consciousness," advertised an art exhibition that took place in 1969. Known as Hash Girl (Hashflicka in Swedish), the poster harkens to Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting "Liberty Leading the People," and shows a naked woman smoking hash in a long-stemmed pipe, with a reproduction of Delacroix’s painting in the top right-hand corner (pictured). 

"Hashish works as a guide to areas in the psyche that one later can return to without taking the drug, that is one can stop smoking hashish when one has become familiar with those landscapes which the drug has opened up the road to – just as it is the case with other psychedelic drugs," Johannesson said. In his Psychedelic Manifesto, he wrote, "Freedom is not an imperishable phraseological wash-wear costume one puts on in elementary school, freedom is a lump of hashish in tinfoil, the freedom you cannot hide in your boots or underwear without the police finding it, freedom is a ball of tinfoil one squeezes in one’s hand and is ready to throw away when power intervenes....The cultural worker must be an artist with no claim to be taken seriously, reliability comes in the form of a cop’s badge. One should sell hashish, not oil paintings or theatre tickets."

Take Me to Another World, Charlotte Johannesson

Charlotte Johannesson trained as a weaver and is a self-taught pioneer in the use of digital graphics as an artistic medium. Over the past five decades, she "has developed a rich oeuvre which combines the craft technology of the loom with the digital technology of computer programming, exploring their formal and conceptual connections." A 2021 exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, featuring the artist's computer-graphics-inspired weavings, also features a pot leaf. 

What Made the Etruscan Women Smile?

Sarcophagus lid in The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy exhibit in SF

The Etruscans, who thrived in Italy between the 9th and 2nd centuries BC before they were slowly conquered by the Romans, invented so-called "Roman" numerals and the famous "Roman" sewers, and pioneered winemaking in Italy, among their many accomplishments and innovations. Wealthy traders, they were among the three main powers in the ancient Mediterranean, along with the Greeks and the Phoenicians. 

Nearly all of their written records were destroyed, but a current exhibit at the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco tells their story in the form of over 200 amazing Etruscan artifacts from museums around the world, including finely crafted pottery, metal work, and statuary. Household objects like mirrors and vases depict parties or (s)heroic scenes, and both Etruscan women and men are depicted on funeral urns and sarcophagi. 

The Etruscans were people who loved to party, it seems. Banquets were very important to them and banquet scenes are found on painted the walls of their tombs, since they felt death was more a transition than a finality. There's such a thing as the "Etruscan smile," and many of the pieces in the exhibit recorded these, particularly on the women, whose eyes look rather dreamy as they give a kind of knowing Mona Lisa smile.