Bonnie Maclean

Bonnie MacLean’s biography reads like a story arc on the TV show Madmen. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1939, MacLean studied French at Penn State. She moved to San Francisco in 1963, and while working as a secretary for an industrial manufacturer, she befriended then began dating her boss – a young go-getter named Bill Graham. By the time they married in 1967, MacLean was indispensable to Graham’s launching the Fillmore Auditorium, Winterland, and many other efforts. She designed the first Bill Graham Production poster and crafted advertisements inside the Fillmore, but it wasn’t until Graham’s bitter split with Wes Wilson that she had a chance to fully spread her creative wings. As the only woman who consistently designed major posters in that milieu, MacLean’s story is a fascinating microcosm of the roles women typically played at the time. Many of her posters are as iconic as any in the period, with her imagery tending to dreamily invoke a fairytale realm of kings, queens, strolling bards, and questing knights-errant. At the advent of a final wave of poster artists like Lee Conklin and Randy Tuten, MacLean retreated. She and Graham divorced in 1975, while she developed into an accomplished if more conventional painter.