Bonnie Maclean, Famed ’60s Fillmore Poster Artist And Wife Of Bill Graham, Dies

Bill McCay/Getty Images – Bonnie Maclean
Artist Bonnie MacLean, who designed the original Fillmore 60

Bonnie Maclean, the in-house poster artist for the original Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco in the late 1960s and former wife of the late Bill Graham, died Feb. 4, at a hospice care facility in Newton, Pa. She was 80.

Her death was confirmed by a Pennsylvania funeral home, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. 

She wasn’t as well known as Haight-Ashbury artists who became associated with the counterculture iconography of the time such as her Fillmore predecessor Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse, and Alton Kelley, but she was a pioneer as the one of the few women in the field. 

Her hand-drawn bills and posters advertising concerts by Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, the Who, the Doors, the Yardbirds and more became cultural artifacts that continue to be coveted by collectors and have been displayed in museums including San Francisco’s de Young Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art.

Maclean moved to San Francisco In 1963 and was hired by Graham as his secretary  at the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Co., prior to his becoming business manager of the San Francisco Mime Troup and and eventually becoming the world’s most famous concert promoter at the Fillmore and beyond.

Maclean and Graham married in June 1967, one weekend before the Monterey International Pop Festival. They had a son, David Graham, in 1968 but separated in 1971 and divorced four years later.

Graham died in a helicopter crash returning to his Marin County home after a concert in 1991. In 2015, Maclean was commissioned to design a commemorative poster for a Hall & Oates concert marking the grand opening of the Philadelphia Fillmore, as well as an exhibit on Bill Graham at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.