Austin’s music has a look — and it was drawn by hand. The South Austin Museum of Popular Culture (SAMOPC) preserves the poster art that papered the city from the Armadillo World Headquarters era onward: the cosmic armadillos, cosmic cowboys and psychedelic lettering of artists like Jim Franklin, Danny Garrett and Kerry Awn.
The museum’s exhibitions rotate through decades of Austin counterculture — concert posters, photographs, flyers and memorabilia of the venues and characters who made “Keep Austin Weird” a documentary fact before it was a bumper sticker. Many of the poster artists themselves guide the story; this is a museum run by its own exhibits, gloriously.
Tiny, dense and joyful, SAMOPC is the visual archive of a scene the world now imitates. South Lamar’s coolest time capsule.
