I am seeing almost all of this for the first time,” says Paul Yamazaki. “I’m least familiar with his work on paper.”
I am in the Logan Gallery at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor on a preview visit to the museum’s exhibition Ferlinghetti for San Francisco. Open now through March 22, 2026, Ferlinghetti explores the visual art of a figure best known for his work as a poet, a political activist, and the founder of City Lights Bookstore. Guiding me through this remarkable bookseller’s world are Natalia Lauricella, curator of prints and drawings for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, and Yamazaki, City Lights’ longtime book buyer and Ferlinghetti’s colleague for more than 50 years.
If you even casually follow the Bay Area literary scene, you likely know the outlines of his life and career. Ferlinghetti’s turbulent youth, navy deployment in World War II, and 1951 arrival in San Francisco just as the combustible compound of the Beat movement was about to ignite. In 1953, he and a partner ponied up $500 to open a bookstore on Columbus Avenue, where North Beach meets Chinatown. The nation’s first all-paperback bookstore, City Lights, almost immediately became the Beat generation’s ground zero—a hangout for poets, those local and visiting, such as Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, and Gary Snyder. In 1956, Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Publishing brought Allen Ginsberg’s Howl into the world. The poem, a Beat odyssey, sparked a landmark First Amendment legal battle. Ferlinghetti wrote too: more than 30 books, including his best-known poetry collection, A Coney Island of the Mind, in 1958 and the memoir-novel Little Boy, his final work, published shortly before his death, at age 101, in 2021.
He was also a skilled artist, but life kept getting in his way. “I wanted to be a painter,” he said, “but from the age of 10 onward, these damn poems kept coming. Perhaps one of these days they will leave me alone and I can get back to painting.” Eventually, he found the time. Ferlinghetti focuses on the art he created later in life: prints—etchings and lithographs and letterpress—made in his Hunter’s Point studio. Each series was produced in small quantities, Lauricella explains, generally 30 or so. He would sell some, give some to friends. “It was, I think, art-making for himself—kind of private, almost a sanctuary,” she says.
Elegantly displayed in the Legion’s intimate Logan Gallery of Illustrated Books, Ferlinghetti for San Francisco includes more than 20 of these works, drawn primarily from Ferlinghetti’s estate. Lauricella says that in collaboration with Ferlinghetti’s longtime assistant, Mauro Aprile Zanetti, she and other curators selected books, drawings, and prints meant to show the range of the artist’s work.
The ocean, as a theme, dominates the exhibition. Upon entering the Logan, viewers are first greeted by Adrift, an etching of a conjoined man and woman stranded in a small, fragile boat. Hung not far away is a trio of lithographs, The Sea Within Us, which bobs with more boats and beleaguered sailors, scrawled messages swirling above them: “The Sea Was a Part of Him / And He Was a Part of the Sea / The Sea Is Within Us.”
“[Ferlinghetti] made a lot of boat prints, boat paintings,” says Lauricella. “Not to psychoanalyze him too much, but he was in the navy, he was at D-Day in Normandy in 1944. And he was deeply fond of [J.M.W.] Turner’s watercolor scenes and paintings of the water. There are often figures adrift and afloat.”
In other works, the worlds of Ferlinghetti’s poetry and art collide. The brooding, angry Out of Chaos: A Poem in Three Lithographs is perhaps the exhibition’s most powerful work: three visions of chaos that possess a nightmarish intensity. In Rivers of Light, Ferlinghetti pairs his poem with a sinuous, riverine graphic element that turns metaphor into luminous reality. Elsewhere, Yamazaki notes, “I see with some of Lawrence’s stuff is his conversations with Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger and their interest in Japanese calligraphy—that gestural element and the immediacy.”
For Yamazaki, the exhibition reveals a lesser-known facet of a figure who helped set the course of his life. A disaffected exile from the San Fernando Valley, the young Yamazaki arrived in San Francisco in 1967, in time to join the building movement against the Vietnam War. When he protested, he occasionally got into fights, one of which landed him a six-month jail sentence. If he could get a job, Yamazaki was told, the sentence would be reduced. A poet friend who worked at City Lights, Francis Oka, convinced Ferlinghetti to hire Yamazaki. He started by packing books—and stayed, more than 50 years, rising to book buyer and developing such a sure instinct that New York Times book critic Dwight Garner once proclaimed, “Pound for pound, City Lights is almost certainly the best bookstore in the United States.” In 2023, Yamazaki was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.
I ask Yamazaki: “What was Ferlinghetti like to work with for so many years?”
“I don’t know if Lawrence would agree with this,” he says, “but I always thought of him as being a very shy person. As somebody who worked with him, he was incredibly—the word that I used is trust. Once he knew that we were all working in the same direction, he let us do our jobs. I think you see all these things tied together in his visual work.”
Our visit ends on a note of surreal wackiness: a 2006 photolithograph of a beret-wearing Ferlinghetti sitting on a battered wooden chair. A bare department store mannequin perched nymphlike on his lap.
“Isn’t it wild?” Lauricella says. “We thought it was really funny.”
Yamazaki says the portrait is a tribute to Ferlinghetti’s sense of humor: “That was one of the things those of us who worked with him got to experience a lot.”
What, I ask Yamazaki, would Ferlinghetti think of the exhibition?
“This would’ve made him very, very happy.”•
FERLINGHETTI FOR SAN FRANCISCO
July 19, 2025—March 22, 2026
Legion of Honor
110 34th Ave., San Francisco
Peter Fish is a writer, editor, and teacher specializing in California and the American West. He lives in San Francisco.
