Image: AT Gallery, Poznań
Bolinas Museum will present 'All This Every Day: Bolinas Community Publishing in the Seventies' from August 22 to September 26, 2026. Curated by Noelle Hiam and Kirston Lightowler, the exhibition looks at the town’s publishing culture in the 1970s through newsletters, magazines, posters, pamphlets and photographs drawn largely from the museum’s own history archives.
The show is framed around a period in which Bolinas became, in the museum’s words, both one of the most concentrated literary communities in America and one of its most uncommonly radical ones. The museum describes that shift not as a single movement or planned experiment, but as a convergence of literary, ecological, political, artistic and communal energies that shaped the town’s identity and still inform it today. The exhibition title comes from Joanne Kyger’s 1975 collection, published by her neighbor Bill Berkson on the Bolinas mesa.
According to the exhibition text, the materials on view are the material evidence of that period’s publishing activity: mimeographed newsletters, hand-silkscreened poetry magazines, letterpress posters, photocopied pamphlets, a Swedish folk tale illustrated with linocuts, and a phone book that began as handwritten stapled pages and is still published today. Among the publications named in the announcement are 'Big Sky', Bill Berkson’s nationally distributed poetry magazine, 'Local Energy', Lloyd Kahn’s 52-page newspaper published as the spring equinox issue of the 'Bolinas Hearsay News' in 1975, and 'The Bolinas Hit', described as eight pages of pure anarchy.
The exhibition also places these publications alongside artworks and photographs connected to the same milieu. The museum cites Philip Guston’s original pen-and-ink drawing for 'Big Sky 4' and Ilka Hartmann’s photographs of Paradise Valley during the 1970s. Most of the items have been drawn from Bolinas Museum’s archives, which the institution presents as the result of decades of collecting by the community itself.
Bolinas Museum’s account of the project emphasizes the social entanglement of publishing, activism and daily life in the town. It notes that poets sat on the water board, that a butcher founded a newspaper, and that a minister-turned-woodcarver established a craft guild. It also points to Lloyd Kahn’s experiments with geodesic domes and his subsequent 'Shelter' publication as a response, as well as the 1971 water meter moratorium that the museum says is still in effect today.
The exhibition is organized around the idea that a community must speak for itself. The museum quotes the 'Hearsay News', founded by Michael Rafferty behind the butcher counter and still publishing today: “Everyone is a Reporter.” It also quotes a line from Shelter Publications pamphlets: “If we don’t become agricultural, they’ll make us recreational.” 'All This Every Day: Bolinas Community Publishing in the Seventies' will be on view at Bolinas Museum, 48 Wharf Road, Bolinas, California, with museum hours listed as Friday 1-5 PM and Saturday-Sunday 12-5 PM, and admission free.
