Arts Listings

Goines Posters on Display at Hillside Club

By Karen Jacobs, Special to the Planet
Friday November 30, 2007

See 100 posters by David Lance Goines at the Hillside Club this weekend. 

Rather than pay a museum to see art by dead artists you can see, free, great work by a living Berkeley craftsman, and meet him in a rustic building surrounded by his work. 

Like the club, the work of Goines invites you into domesticity, to hearth and home. The posters and the building often feel like a comforter. Subdued colors and soft curving images soothe the eyes - intimate and homey. 

To preview the posters go to www.goines.net. At www.hillsideclub.org view the arts & crafts clubhouse. Introduce yourself, children, guests and people new to Berkeley to a great Berkeley craftsman and a historic neighborhood club. 

Goines came to Berkeley in 1963 to study classics. Advocating free speech, he was among 800 students arrested for occupying Sproul Hall. This landed Goines, then 19, in jail. His personal account of these times is told in his compelling book, The Free Speech Movement; Coming of Age in the 1960s. 

The university reinstated Goines but he had lost his appetite for school. Apprenticing to a printer, he became a journeyman by printing radical literature. In 1970 Goines bought the business and moved it to 1703 Grove Street, later renamed Martin Luther King Junior Way. Goines still prints there because, “I have no desire to go anywhere else. This pays enough to keep soul and body together. And, I like doing it!” 

In 1968 Goines and a partner did a monthly food column in the San Francisco Express. This collaboration led to a publication, Thirty Recipes Suitable for Framing, compiled and edited by Alice Louise Waters, calligraphy and illustrations by David L. Goines. Every year his Saint Hieronymus Press makes a new poster for Waters’ restaurant, Chez Panisse. 

Goines designs posters. He prints them on his photo offset press. He prints every poster himself. Each color gets printed separately; his posters have 1 to 22 colors. As his skills evolved his work became more sophisticated, more elegant. 

Goines posters are in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Hiroshima Museum of Modern Art, the Musée de la Publicité of the Louvre in Paris and homes all over Berkeley. 

David Goines has qualities common in Berkeley. He has opinions. He has passions. He is intelligent, thorough, inventive and his own person. He is proud of being on the board of the Northern California American Red Cross. A seventeen gallon blood donor, Goines warns, “Not enough people donate blood. You never know when you will need it.” 

Six days a week Goines walks the mile from his home to his press and back again. 

Hillside Club member Bill Woodcock planned this show to celebrate 40 years of St. Hieronymus Press and the 110th anniversary of the Hillside Club. Woodcock says, “Goines is an internationally recognized craftsman for whom local recognition is long overdue. The authenticity of his work resonates well with the arts and crafts clubhouse.” 

Silicon Valley PR connector and club enthusiast Sylvia Paull says she believes that “The club has all the strains of Berkeley—community, enjoying cultural events together, being part of living history. For me it’s a spiritual place....and I’m an atheist!” 

The club began in 1898: a group of Berkeley women met to preserve nature and to promote art. Activist Annie Maybeck, incensed that the town was about to cut down a tree for Le Roy Street, near Ridge Road, campaigned to save the tree. “Annie’s Oak” was saved a century ago. Now, nearby, some people occupy a grove of oak trees, also trying to save them. 

The 1906 clubhouse, designed by Annie’s husband, Bernard Maybeck, burned in the Berkeley fire of 1923. By 1924 the clubhouse was rebuilt. The building, rarely noticed because it so thoroughly blends into the neighborhood, has long vertical windows for shafts of daylight, a massive stone fireplace and a copper lamp from the original clubhouse. 

The Hillside Club hosts many community events: cybersalons, dances, potlucks and movies. Members form groups around their interests. The Etude Club, for club members who are musicians, has been meeting and playing music together since 1904. 

Come to the Hillside Club for five minutes or an hour this weekend. Treat yourself to a relaxing, stimulating visit. You can meet members of Berkeley’s oldest community club and the club’s gracious managers, Erma Wheatley and John Feld. Consider buying a poster or joining the club. See 100 posters and meet their maker, David Lance Goines. 

 

DAVID LANCE GOINES 

10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sunday at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. www.goines.net.  

www.hillsideclub.org.