Jacaeber Kastor
Jacaeber Kastor is an American writer, artist, gallery-owner, and curator of psychedelic art, best known for founding and directing the influential Psychedelic Solution gallery in New York City’s West Village from 1986 to 2004. Emerging from the 1960s Bay Area counterculture, he became a leading collector, historian, and promoter of psychedelic poster art and related underground visual culture, helping connect classic San Francisco rock-poster artists with later lowbrow and pop-surrealist scenes.
Biography
Early life
Kastor grew up in Berkeley, California and was exposed to the 1960s counter-culture as a young man. His parents were abstract artists.He picked up the habit of drawing from his mother, a serial doodler who covered the family desk pad with abstract drawing while talking on the phone.
While working as a traffic patrol boy in 1965 he was hit by a car and seriously injured. Bedridden, he began drawing elaborate topographical landscapes with settlements. He began collecting psychedelic posters and handbills from venues in the Bay Area during the 1960s.
Before becoming a gallery owner, Kastor was a competitive skier, racing in Squaw Valley.
Artist
In 2019 his drawings were shown in a retrospective exhibit titled “The Psychedelic Sun & Other Drawings” at Brian Chambers The Chambers Project gallery in Nevada City, California.Writer
Kastor is a contributing author of The Art of the Fillmore, a book about San Francisco rock posters. He published and contributed writing to a booklet about Stanislav Szukalski titled "Song of the Mute Singer." Between 1991 and 1995 he worked as a columnist for Wes Wilson's ‘Off the Wall’ magazine, writing about psychedelic rock concert poster art & culture.In addition to his work as author of books, he wrote editorial content as the New York correspondent for UK magazine Zigzag in 1982. In the early 2000s he became a contributing writer for Juxtapoz Magazine, and was given a credit as “Psychedelic Guru” on the masthead.