- Venue
- The Muse Gallery
- Starts
- Thursday, August 8, 2024
- Ends
- Sunday, August 18, 2024
- Address
- 269 Portobello Road, W11 1LR
- Location
- London
- Organiser
- The Muse Gallery
Immerse yourself in Lee Harris’s counterculture stories that form part of our community histories, showcasing events and cultural shifts that have shaped and touched people’s lives over the decades up to the present day. Explore film, music, spoken word performances, artwork, photographs, posters, comix, and other materials from the 1960s to the 2020s, carefully curated from the Lee Harris Archive. This exhibition represents counterculture in the community and its various artistic expressions over the years and up to now.
Lee ran London’s first “headshop” in the early 1970s on Portobello Road, in the building now housing The MUSE Gallery, which was the former site of his shop Alchemy. The exhibition comes full circle, showcasing some of the early work of the graphic artist Bryan Talbot through the publication of the Brainstorm Comix series by Alchemy Press, along with selected artwork from HomeGrown, the counterculture and cannabis-focused magazine that Lee published and edited from 1977 until 1982.
From tales of theatre in the late fifties and early 1960s to hanging out with Mods in Soho, from playwriting to Swinging Sixties London and the hippiedom of the Summer of Love, experience the cultural changes over the decades and beyond the millennium. The Lee Harris Archive continues to inspire artists with present-day interpretations, including a contemporary soundscape by Hicham Bensassi.
The Museum of Youth Culture, collaborators in the digitisation of HomeGrown magazine and the wider archive of posters and ephemera, will present a short talk during the Private View followed by a Q&A on the Lee Harris Archive set in the context of the counterculture scenes in London at the time and in the Notting Hill area.
BOOK:
“Echoes of the Underground: A Footsoldier’s Tales” offers a first-hand look into the cultural revolutions of the 60s, 70s, and beyond through a rich tapestry of articles, interviews, and personal notes. Lee Harris, a participant in the counterculture movements of these pivotal times, provides an authentic narrative that captures the essence of a generation striving for artistic expression, social justice, and profound change.
SOUNDSCAPE:
The soundscape created by Hicham Bensassi is a psychedelic, ambient, auditory journey. It features a blend of new music compositions, audio collages, and rare live performance recitals of select pieces from Lee Harris’s book Echoes of the Underground: A Footsoldier’s Tales. The soundscape includes the track ‘Summer of 68’ featuring Amira Harris, and showcases musicians such as James Burnham, Paul Bangash, and Georgina Brett.
