Light by Bill Ham: One Time, One Chance

The Haight Street Art Center’s latest exhibition is “Light by Bill Ham: One Time, One Chance,” which features almost 40 acrylic-on-canvas paintings from the past five years by artist Bill Ham. To commemorate the show, a limited-edition screen print of one of Ham’s painting, printed on Swirl3 foil donated by Exceptional Papers, is available at the gallery. Also on view at HSAC is a selection of TRPS Artist Relief Trust posters by Dave Hunter, Emek, Gary Houston, Stanley Mouse, and Luke Martin. Both exhibitions will be up from September 14 to October 29, 2023. Below is a selection of photos from the opening, courtesy of emi ito.

In the spring and summer of 1966, a dozen or so posters designed by artists Wes Wilson, Alton Kelley, and Stanley Mouse, promoting dance concerts at the Avalon Ballroom, included the words “Lights by Bill Ham” on them. Back then, Ham was the Avalon’s go-to light-show guy, a legend in his own time when it came to psychedelicized projected light.

It’s always been a bit ironic that Bill Ham should be so closely associated with all things psychedelic just because he did some light shows for Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and the Grateful Dead. In fact, Ham was, and still is, into jazz—Django Reinhardt, John Coltrane, and Elvin Jones are a few of his favorites—while one of his first light shows was accompanied by the heavenly voices and booming kettle drums of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana.”

Ham always thought of his light shows as serious works of art, variously referring to them as “kinetic Abstract Expressionism” or “electric action painting.” From the beginning, San Francisco’s daily newspapers agreed, sending their first-tier art critics to report on his work as early as January 1966, several months before his Avalon run. The favorable coverage that ensued led to a series of performances with jazz musicians in 1967 at the San Francisco Museum of Art, followed by a half century of similar events around the world, whether at the artist’s Light Sound Dimension Theatre on California Street or at arts institutions across Europe, where Ham lived for three years in the early 1970s.

Thus, Ham’s legacy as an artist has always extended well beyond the fact that his name appeared on a few Avalon posters. Indeed, if that narrow context was all a viewer had to go by, the artist’s untitled acrylic-on-canvas paintings of the past five years, the main focus of “Light by Bill Ham: One Time, One Chance,” might be mistaken for psychedelic snapshots from one of San Francisco’s most storied dance halls, objects of nostalgia rather than the exuberant, forward-looking examples of 21st-century action painting that they are.

In action painting, specific moments in time can never be reclaimed, making serendipity an artist’s friend—both have determined the appearance of Ham’s recent paintings, just as time and chance once dictated the look of his light shows, which were as “in the moment” as the free spirits on the Avalon’s open dance floor, writhing and swaying to the improvisational sounds pouring forth from the stage. The main difference between Ham’s work in projected versus reflected light is that paint tends to stop moving once it dries.

The Haight Street Art Center is located at 215 Haight Street, just west of Laguna. Hours are noon to 6, Thursday to Sunday. Admission is free. For more information, visit haightstreetart.org.