A group of art show invitations and flyers from the personal collection of Dennis Hopper, including: a couples only black light art show hosted by the San Francisco League for Sexual Freedom, Ed Ruscha at The Texas Gallery, Dennis Hopper in Taos, Roy Lichtenstein at Ferus Gallery, and four copies of a mailer for a Paul Kelsey show at The Dennis Hopper Gallery of Art.

Together with color photographs taken around the “Russian Dynamite Death Chair Act” event performed by Hopper at the Big H Speedway in Houston, Texas to promote his film Out of the Blue (Discovery Films, 1982).

Hopper was scheduled to deliver a lecture on Out of the Blue for students at Rice University. Following the screening, however, Hopper bused the students out to the race track where he reproduced an act he had seen in a traveling road show as a child: he lit six sticks of dynamite beneath a chair he was seated on. The trick works because if the dynamite is pointed outwards, the explosion creates a vacuum in the center, leaving the person on the chair unharmed.

The scene was described thus by a Rice News student correspondent: "Dennis Hopper, at one with the shock wave, was thrown headlong in a halo of fire. For a single, timeless instant he looked like Wile E. Coyote, frazzled and splayed by his own petard. Then billowing smoke hid the scene. We all rushed forward, past the police, into the expanding cloud of smoke, excited, apprehensive, and no less expectant than we had been before the explosion. Were we looking for Hopper or pieces we could take home as souvenirs? Later Hopper would say blowing himself up was one of the craziest things he has ever done, and that it was weeks before he could hear again. At the moment, though, none of that mattered. He had been through the thunder, the light, and the heat, and he was still in one piece. And when Dennis Hopper staggered out of that cloud of smoke his eyes were glazed with the thrill of victory and spinout."

11 x 8.5 inches (largest)

PROVENANCE Property from the Life and Career of Dennis Hopper

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