“Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era” could be a crowd-pleaser — luring children of the 1960s who aren’t on a beach somewhere into a museum for a slightly hazy trip down memory lane.

But the man behind the exhibition, which opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art on May 24, after originating at the Tate Liverpool and traveling to Germany and Austria, has a serious goal in mind. The director of the Tate Liverpool, Christoph Grunenberg, argues that psychedelic art has been unjustly ignored by art historians and wants to see it restored to its place in the story of late-20th-century artistic movements.

When he had the idea in the late 1990s, Mr. Grunenberg said, he was inspired by two things: the influence of the ’60s on contemporary artists like Fred Tomaselli and Chris Ofili, and the revival of ’60s style in design and fashion, whether in the curving shapes of a designer like Mark Newson, or the psychedelic patterns of Dolce & Gabbana, or the revived Pucci line.

But while much of the exhibit is obviously devoted to the aesthetic atmosphere and influence of the period, Mr. Grunenberg said it is also intended to offer a social history, through posters as well as photographs and films documenting events like the multimedia Trips Festival in 1966 at Longshoremen’s Hall in San Francisco and the Human Be-In in 1968 in Golden Gate Park.

“There’s a continuing fascination with the ’60s and the impact they had in the breaking down of encrusted structures and challenging of authority in terms of morality and sexual behavior,” Mr. Grunenberg said. “The show tries to go beyond the pure aesthetic consumption of the period and say, ‘Look, this was an incredibly exciting time — a time that still had a genuine belief in managing a radical change in the present situation.'”

It is for both sociohistorical and aesthetic reasons, Mr. Grunenberg believes, that psychedelic art has been sidelined from art history. It is, in the first place, tainted by its close association with popular culture — a “blurring of the lines between so-called serious art and applied art,” Mr. Grunenberg said. One of the main media for psychedelic art was album covers, of which the exhibition will include a large number. The painter Mati Klarwein, for instance, is probably best known for his painting “Annunciation,” which Carlos Santana chose for the cover of “Abraxas,” and the other images he did for Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix.

Another form in which psychedelic art mingled with the commercial music scene was the production of light shows, which accompanied concerts at venues like the Fillmore East and the Electric Circus in New York and the UFO Club in London. Andy Warhol was a pioneer of light shows, with his show “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” featuring the Velvet Underground and Nico, which opened in April 1966 at the Dom in New York. The purpose of a light show was to enhance the experience of the music — and the drugs that most of the audience were taking. Artists had their own distinctive styles, but most light shows involved a combination of “wet show” techniques (colored liquids were mixed in glass dishes on overhead projectors), color wheels, painted slides, and projected film or video.

Although many of the multimedia events happened in nightclubs, art galleries, like the Robert Fraser Gallery in London and the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, also straddled the worlds of high art and pop culture. Mr. Fraser was a powerful dealer who helped launch the careers of artists including Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley, and Jim Dine; he was also a close friend of the Beatles and art-directed the cover for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Wise was a major force behind kinetic art, light sculpture, and video art. He presented exhibitions including “Lights in Orbit” and “TV as a Creative Medium.”

Besides being tainted by its ties to pop culture and its exploitation by the press, psychedelic art, Mr. Grunenberg argues, has also been disregarded for aesthetic reasons. With its bright colors, fluid shapes, and busy designs — aspects meant to recall the visual distortions experienced on LSD — psychedelic art runs against the ideals that art history has generally privileged.

The catalog for “Summer of Love” reprints an essay titled “Freaks” by the cultural critic Dave Hickey, comparing psychedelic art to other “antiacademic” styles like Rococo, Pre-Raphaelite, and Art Nouveau. These styles, Mr. Hickey argues, are characterized visual gestures “that have been permanently out of academic fashion for nearly 300 years”: They “prioritize complexity over simplicity, pattern over form, repetition over composition, feminine over masculine, curvilinear over rectilinear, and the fractal, the differential, and the chaotic over Euclidean order.”

“If one thinks about how puritan in many ways the taste of the art establishment always has been,” Mr. Grunenberg said, “and how playful and indulgent and exuberant [psychedelic art] was, one begins to understand why it didn’t make it into the museums.”

Some psychedelic artists have been accepted by the mainstream art world, but only gradually, like Yayoi Kusama, whose “Infinity Mirrored Room Love Forever” (1996) is included in the show. Other artists, like Warhol and John McCracken, who, in addition to his Minimalist sculptural work, did a series of colorful mandala paintings in the ’70s, have been celebrated without their work in the psychedelic vein being recognized.

The Whitney’s version of the exhibition will include several works that the Whitney itself acquired in the late ’60s and early ’70s, including Paul Jenkins’s “Phenomena Blue Succession” (1965), Richard Linder’s “Ice” (1966), a light box by Earl Reiback called “Lumia Opus 4” (1966), Peter Saul’s “Saigon” (1967), and Lucas Samaras’s “Chair Transformation Number 25A” (1969-70). The curator at the Whitney who is organizing the show, Henriette Huldisch, said while she wouldn’t describe Mr. Samaras as a psychedelic artist — “He’s always been a singular figure and hard to categorize,” she said — his work does have a similar visual vocabulary. In particular, the chair transformations, she noted, are “very brightly painted, completely amorphous, [with] the flowing lines that you see in psychedelic graphic art or paintings.”

The Whitney exhibition will include a repeating daily program of film screenings, as well as a one time festival of Warhol films on the weekend of July 14–15. There will also be public panels, on such subjects as “Vision and Violence” and “Escapism and Activism in the American Scene,” featuring, respectively, the writer William T. Vollmann, and the cultural historian Greil Marcus and media scholar Todd Gitlin.