Ken Kesey’s historic school bus, Furthur, has returned to San Francisco after 60 years to serve as the centerpiece of a new exhibition celebrating the legacy of the Grateful Dead and the city’s 1960s counterculture movement. The exhibition, titled Forever Grateful/Golden Gate Park,
opens Saturday at the County Fair Building in Golden Gate Park.
Furthur Bus and Jerry Garcia’s BMW Return to San Francisco for Landmark Exhibition
Alongside the brightly painted bus, the exhibition features Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia’s BMW, which remains in mint condition and has never been displayed publicly before. These two flagship artifacts anchor a display organized by the Haight Street Art Center designed to immerse visitors in the visual, auditory, and cultural landscape of the era.
This invites people to communicate and connect around art, music, and activism,
said Kelly Harris, executive director of the Haight Street Art Center. In this day and age, when we need something to bridge community, we know that this space allows for that to happen and Furthur is the portal.
Origins of the Psychedelic Journey and the Grateful Dead
Ken Kesey purchased the vehicle in 1964 using proceeds from his bestselling novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Accompanied by his Merry Band of Pranksters, Kesey piloted the bus on a cross-country journey fueled by marijuana and LSD to explore artistic expression, music, and mind-expanding substances, helping introduce Americans to the emerging psychedelic scene. That historic road trip was later chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 bestseller, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Upon returning to California, Kesey hosted a series of parties at his home in the hills above Stanford University known as the “acid tests.” These gatherings featured a local bar band called The Warlocks, which subsequently transformed into the Grateful Dead. As the parties moved on the road throughout the Bay Area, the bus became a defining emblem of the movement.
Formed in 1965, the Grateful Dead became deeply bound to San Francisco’s cultural identity. Band members originally shared a low-cost Victorian house in the Haight neighborhood before emerging as central figures during the 1967 Summer of Love.
Exhibition Highlights, Community Impact, and Visitor Experience
The retrospective arrives as San Francisco grapples with widening economic inequality driven by an AI-driven technology boom, alongside broader national political friction, divisions, and collective fatigue.
This entire exhibit, it’s a very layered story of the Grateful Dead and their influence, their phenomenon, and their impact on communities, on society, on people, and how their legacy still lives on, Renee de Cossio
The event includes contributions from Third Rail Projects and is open through October 25. Visitors can view archival photographs of the band’s Golden Gate Park concerts, experience a hands-on screen-printing station, and participate in a guided experience featuring a 1960s liquid light show that projects colorful, shifting psychedelic patterns across the room.
Organized in collaboration with Third Rail Projects, the event also supports restoration efforts for the worn Furthur bus. The vehicle, which acquired its name following a destination sign error, had been kept on the Kesey family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, and was last shown publicly at Woodstock in 1969.
