Steven Arnold: Cocktails in Heaven

GLBT Historical Society proudly presents the San Francisco debut of Steven Arnold: Cocktails in Heaven, in partnership with Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles, and the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.

This iteration of Cocktails in Heaven explores the visionary, multidisciplinary artist Steven Arnold during the electric, genre-defying, gender-bending, halcyon days of late-1960s San Francisco counterculture. Drawing heavily from both Arnold’s archives and the Society’s collections, the exhibition highlights Arnold’s impact on the emergent queer iconoclasm of the era through his relationships with some of the city’s most irreverent queer artists, including legendary avant-garde theater troupe, the Cockettes; iconic disco-diva Sylvester; and visionary fashion designer Kaisik Wong.

Arnold began his prolific decades-long career in San Francisco, before traveling to New York, France, Spain, and Los Angeles, studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and emerging as one of the most unique artists of the era, blending psychedelia, mysticism, camp, cinema, science fiction, and eroticism. The exhibition likewise takes a multifocal approach, looking not just at Arnold’s individual practice but at the propulsive currents of artists, subcultures, and sociocultural movements exploding across the city and region.

The exhibition features original Steven Arnold drawings, prints, photographs, experimental shorts, and posters; as well as costumes, jewelry, and archival ephemera of Sylvester, Kaisik Wong, the Cockettes, and other enclaves of a multiracial, multigendered, queer San Francisco, underscoring the intertwined and enduring relationship between LGBTQ+ art, history, and culture.

Steven Arnold: Cocktails in Heaven is a technicolor panoply of free love, free thought, and free spirit that artists, activists, dreamers, and disruptors in this city still invigorate today.