They say the art of rock and roll is at LC

Lynchburg College’s Daura Gallery is celebrating “50 Years of Rock” with its latest show.

The touring exhibit, organized by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, features 20 posters of legendary rockers like Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Elvis, Jim Morrison and The Beatles.

Daura Gallery Director Barbara Rothermel says it is just an extension of what they try to do at the Daura: expose people to both high art and popular culture.

“They so often have strong overlaps,” she says. “I think it’s important for us to have both.”

The exhibit, she says, shows how graphic design and music “grew up together.”

“Looking at that connection is tremendously important,” she says. “They work so closely together. … We need to always examine where these things come from and how they change.”

The 20 posters were made between 1957 and 1996.

They include designs promoting everything from a 1957 Elvis Dairy Show in Tupelo, Miss., to a 1966 performance by The Beatles in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park to Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition Tour.

There are 1960s psychedelic ads for Jimi Hendrix and The Doors; a 1971 James Brown poster that dubs him the “Sex Machine;” a black-and-white design for a 1977 Ramones/
Talking Heads concert in Switzerland; and a brightly colored one for a series of concerts the Grateful Dead performed at the Great Pyramids in Egypt (the poster includes both English and Egyptian script).

The exhibit will remain up in the gallery through December, and a related lecture, “Honky Tonk Angels and Riot Grrrls: Exploring the Gendered Spaces of Rock and Roll,” is scheduled for 4 p.m. Oct. 27, also in the Daura.

Sociology professor Chip Walton says he’ll talk about how rock and roll allows people to challenge traditional ideas about gender — from women who led the punk rock movement, like Joan Jett and Patti Smith, to the androgyny of glam rockers David Bowie and Iggy Pop to what he calls the “fake feminism” of the Spice Girls.

(Here, gender refers to “the social meaning we attribute to men and women,” he says, and not a person’s sex).

Walton says that popular culture is more than simple entertainment.

“It’s really serious in the sense that it teaches us how to see each other and, ultimately, how to see ourselves.”