All This Every Day: Bolinas Community Publishing in the Seventies

"> In the early 1970s, something happened in Bolinas that had never quite happened before and has not happened since: a small California coastal town at the edge of the earth became, simultaneously, one of the most concentrated literary communities in America and one of its most uncommonly radical ones. It was neither a planned experiment nor a single movement. Rather, a range of human energies—literary, ecological, political, artistic, and communal—converged and nourished each other in ways that left an enduring legacy, one that still informs the town’s energy today. Poets sat on the water board. A butcher founded a newspaper. A minister-turned-woodcarver established a craft guild. Lloyd Kahn, the shelter editor for the Whole Earth Catalog, built geodesic domes, lived in them, decided domes didn’t work as homes—and published Shelter as a response. The poets farmed; the farmers wrote. The same people who wrote poems held the line on water—and the water meter moratorium they enacted in 1971 is still in effect today. The publications in this exhibition are the material evidence of all that energy: mimeographed newsletters and hand-silkscreened poetry magazines; letterpress printed posters and photocopied pamphlets; a Swedish folk tale with twenty-five linocut illustrations; a phone book that began as handwritten stapled pages and is still published today. They range from Big Sky—Bill Berkson’s nationally distributed poetry magazine—and Local Energy—Lloyd Kahn’s 52-page newspaper published as the spring equinox issue of the Bolinas Hearsay News in 1975—to The Bolinas Hit, eight pages of pure anarchy. Artworks range from Philip Guston’s original pen and ink drawing for Big Sky 4 to Ilka Hartmann’s photographs of Paradise Valley during the 1970s. The majority of items on display are drawn from Bolinas Museum’s own history archives—testament to decades of quiet, devoted collecting by the community itself. What unites them is not aesthetic or political agreement, but something more fundamental: the conviction that a community speaks for itself, or it does not speak at all. “Everyone is a Reporter,” said the Hearsay News, founded by Michael Rafferty behind the butcher counter and still publishing today. “If we don’t become agricultural, they’ll make us recreational,” said the Shelter Publications pamphlets. The title of the exhibition comes from Joanne Kyger’s 1975 collection, published by her neighbor Bill Berkson on the Bolinas mesa. All this every day—the tides, the cliffs, the neighbors, the ordinary day that is also, if you are paying close attention, everything.