| Subject: Aoxomoxoa |
Author:
ed bryant
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Date Posted: 19:35:33 07/17/04 Sat
I was curious about "art" on your website, and I'm not really awake, so I clicked on it, and was delighted to find "Aoxomoxoa" as the first hit.
The Grateful Dead Album cover was in many collections, and it was an album (we didn't have CD's in those days) whose artwork was superior to the recording. Project 10 in the fall of 1972 was home to just enough tapers that the more likely format for listening to the Dead in the dorm was concert tapes. With the concert tapes, there was even less reason to listen to Dead "albums," but the cover art was of interest to a fair number of people, some of whom weren't stoned. The size of an album cover allowed for more appreciation of detail than does a CD jewel box.
There was in Pierpont, at the western end of the sunset side of the second, third, and fourth floor, a "lounge." On the thirdfloor, the lounge had to converted into a suite by knocking down a portion of the wall separating the nominal lounge from the room to its southeast; on the fourth floor, a suite was built by connecting the lounge to a room to the southwest. The suite created on the third floor became a residence, initially for the Assistant Heads of Residence, David Duncan and Denise Bisaillon. Whoever head the fourth floor room first, in the fall of 1972, it was occupied by David Fuller, Sheila Fitzgerald, Dan Finer, and Jill Josselyn. After Dan left following the Fall, 1972 semester, I lived there with the other aforementioned.
During the Fall 1972 semester, a number of people replicated Aoxomoxoa in pencil, and then took the trouble to add all the colors. Jill Josselyn was very involved in this, as was a man named Brian, whose last name others would know, and Peter Anderson, who became Jill's boyfriend during that semester.
Aoxomoxoa was something of an underground phenomenom for years; people would bring friends into Pierpont years after leaving P-10 to show it to them.
Some fascist or post-modernist painted over it, but it achieved wider publicity when Jerry Garcia died. Deadhead and Massachusetts Governor William F. Weld published a piece in the Boston Globe Focus Section the Sunday following Garcia's death, in which he made hearsay reference to Aoxomoxoa. His source of information for this would have been Rose Marston, who was his official photographers during his time (1991-1997) as governor.
So the actual artist is Griffin or Mouse And Kelly (Dennis McNally's Dead book can be considered definitive, but I have no incentive to look it up), but Jill and Brian and Peter are certainly the lead artisans on the Aoxomoxoa Wall!
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