The ROM exhibition includes 1960s concert and album posters under the psychedelic influence.Royal Ontario Museum/Supplied
How do you make an exhibition about hallucinogenic drugs? At the Royal Ontario Museum, the answer is: very carefully.
Psychedelics: Art. Culture. Science. has been five years in the planning, included input from 36 advisers, and comes with a warning: “ROM does not recommend or encourage the use of psychedelics or provide instructions for their use. Most psychedelics remain illegal in many countries around the world, including Canada.”
Justin Jennings, the archeology curator who organized the show, explains it was a tricky balance between making the show fun – there is an immersive room that reproduces the visual effects of a drug trip – and treating the topic seriously.
“We’d get directions saying it’s too much fun, not fun enough,” he recalls of his interactions with ROM management. “You don’t want to have a downer, but it’s also a challenge because you’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
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Art was the easy part, including Martin Sharp’s 1967 poster of rock star Jimi Hendrix exploding into bursts of colour and José Benítez Sánchez’s 1975 yarn painting that tells the creation story of the Indigenous Huichol people of Mexico, including the role of Mother Peyote.
On organzing the show, archeology curator Justin Jennings says, 'We’d get directions saying it’s too much fun, not fun enough.'Royal Ontario Museum/Supplied
Finding ways to show how psychedelics operate on the brain was harder. In the exhibition, the didactic panel about the brain science, a hypothesis that psychedelics stimulate new connections between neurons, serves as an introduction to an immersive room where a central pillar shows projections of the pulsing geometric patterns and intense colours that the drugs can produce.
In an immersive room, a central pillar shows projections of the pulsing geometric patterns and intense colours that the drugs can produce.Royal Ontario Museum/Supplied
After going underground in the 1970s, psychedelics are much discussed these days for their potential as a treatment for addiction, depression and trauma. The term psychedelic was coined in Canada in 1957 by the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond who was working at the Saskatchewan Mental Hospital in Weyburn, Sask., where he was using LSD and mescaline (derived from peyote) to treat both psychosis and alcoholism.
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The goal was to liberate patients from life-sentences in mental institutions, and Osmond was one of those trying hallucinogens to understand what schizophrenia felt like. The exhibition includes a 1956 letter to him from the British author Aldous Huxley as they discuss possible names for the drugs. Osmond began using the term psychedelic the following year.
But hallucinogens escaped the lab, and recreational use became popular in the counterculture of the 1960s. Then came the law-and-order crackdown in the 1970s.
The ROM's Psychedelics show aims to start a conversation about use.Royal Ontario Museum/Supplied
Jennings, a specialist in Peruvian archeology, is a child of both eras: His parents’ first date was at the Human Be-In in San Francisco in 1967, an event organized partly as a protest against the criminalization of LSD, but he grew up in Pittsburgh, Penn., when the public health advice was “Just Say No.” Today, as the ROM warning says, psychedelics remain illegal but medical interest in the drugs is resurgent. Jennings’s hope for the exhibition is that it will encourage a conversation about their uses.
The recent history of repression in North America, represented in the show by many cool orange-and-pink concert posters from the 1960s and an alarmist anti-drug video of the 1970s, largely ignores centuries of use in Latin America and Africa where hallucinogens have been ingested to liberate the self or speak to the gods.
The psychedelic esthetic of the 1960s flowed into colourful design in the 1970s even as the drugs were criminalized.Royal Ontario Museum/Supplied
“I do archeology in South America and you can’t really do archeology in South America without the psychedelics being front and centre,” Jennings said. “There’s a long tradition, thousands of years, of people taking plants from the Amazon and from the deserts of Peru. And it’s central to everything from power to community.”
The exhibition includes several ancient examples of ceramics from Mexico and Bolivia depicting the use of psychedelics, such as a 1,400-to-1,200-year-old vessel showing a Mayan lord communicating with a deity of the watery deeps, probably thanks to psilocybin mushrooms. Today, the Huichol people in Mexico continue to undertake desert pilgrimages which culminate in eating peyote to inspire visions.
A display at the ROM shows the continuing relationship between the Indigenous Huichol culture in western Mexico and peyote.Royal Ontario Museum/Supplied
Meanwhile, in Africa, the Indigenous people of Gabon practice Bwete, a journey to a new consciousness aided by eating the bark and root of the iboga shrub, and accompanied by the vibrating sound of the mouth bow, also included here.
The spiritual purpose of these visions is linked to the phenomenon of ego dissolution associated with psychedelic experiences, losing the self to connect to a larger or higher world. That isn’t necessarily a pleasant experience: In one of the few newer art works, Ego Death Trip of 2023, artist Annie MacDonell creates a lenticular photographic panel based on a 1967 Toronto Star photograph of a woman on a psychedelic trip. MacDonnell makes the slouched figure unreadable, her face hidden in the accordion-like folds of the long horizontal panel.
“I’m not sure if I want to be that woman on the couch,” Jennings said.
The All-Seeing Eye, a painting by the Indigenous Peruvian artist Olinda Reshinjabe Silvano, shows the hallucinogenic patterns known as kené.Royal Ontario Museum/Supplied
Yes, he has tried hallucinogens, but says he would never try the strong stuff, such as ayahuasca, the psychoactive brew of the caapi vine made by Indigenous peoples of the Amazon.
“The stuff like ayahuasca and iboga scares me because that stuff is really, really strong. They’re purgatives,” he said. He added that he has spoken both with PTSD sufferers who say psychedelics have saved them and with people terrified by their psychedelic experiences. “You don’t want to be promoting it in any way.”
Psychedelics continues at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto to Dec. 6.