SAN FRANCISCO — Few figures are more beloved in San Francisco than Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The late poet, publisher, editor, essayist, critic, and bookseller might be best known to most people for his 1958 poetry collection Coney Island of the Mind, which has sold over a million copies — or for being arrested on obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, or for founding the famed City Lights Bookstore. Thanks to an intimate and lovely exhibition at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, Ferlinghetti is now cultivating a new reputation as an artist.Ferlinghetti for San Francisco gathers lithographs, etchings, prints, broadsides, and letterpress books that the famed poet made in the latter part of his career. The 25 works on view are all drawn from the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts, many of them donated by the author’s estate after his death.Ferlinghetti always claimed painting was his first love, but poems kept getting in the way. It is no surprise that an art exhibit by a poet and publisher goes all in on prints and works on paper. He was, after all, a book guy. In fact, City Lights began as the first all-paperback bookstore in the country, and that commitment to paper and printing is evident in this show. Indeed, Ferlinghetti for San Francisco is a love letter to the great possibilities of the page as it poses fascinating questions about the distinctions and overlaps between “reading” and “seeing.”Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Far Out On the Lake A Dark Boat Drifting” (1993/2020), etchingFor example, in “The Human” (2012), letters, graphemes, and hieroglyphics take center stage. Though the human faces, from which the text seems to emanate, are much larger, they are, paradoxically, less prominent. It is as if the “humans” are relegated to the margins, ceding to the centrality of language. To be human, the piece suggests, is to speak, to write, to make marks, to communicate.Similarly, both “And He Was Part of the Sea” (1998) and “Far Out On the Lake a Dark Boat Drifts” (1993/2020) juxtapose the textual and the pictorial in surprising ways. Text and image jockey for our attention. Words are scrawled boldly above an image and yet simultaneously function as image. They exist within the borders of the seascape and bleed into the frame of the visual field. The words are neither headlines, exactly, nor captions; rather, the decoding experiences are like encountering a comic or even advertising: We read before we see, but the reading is also the seeing. Lawrence Ferlinghetti (artist) and Edward Sanders (author), “Allen Allen” (2000), offset lithograph“Allen Allen” (2000), my favorite piece in the exhibition, also plays with the competing gestures of text and image in compelling ways. Here, a poem celebrating Ginsberg by Edward Sanders becomes Ferlinghetti’s canvas, effectively creating a double tribute. The two Allens — the photograph and Ferlinghetti’s drawing — do not compete but rather complement each other in their mimetic/non-mimetic essences. Image is superimposed on text so that Sanders’s words appear to be emanating, almost godlike, from the mythical poet.Many works in the show are collaborations, which feels like a metaphor for Ferlinghetti’s life. One fine example is Endless Life, a series of 10 drypoint and aquatint prints by Bay Area artist Stephanie Peek that appear alongside sparse poems by Ferlinghetti. Peek’s heavily shaded monochromatic images of the moon (or is it the sun?) reflecting on the ocean, or birds flying into or out of the light or a cave evoke Japanese block prints and scroll paintings, which pair well with the austere, haiku-like verses. Ferlinghetti was one of the great ambassadors of contemporary American poetry. The few times I spoke with him, he never wanted to discuss his own work; he would always recommend other poets I should read. That lack of ego is reflected in the entire exhibit, which is a fitting tribute to his generous spirit and capacious vision. He would have loved everything about this show.Stephanie Peek (artist) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (author), “Endless Life” (1999), boxed folio, letterpress with etchingLawrence Ferlinghetti, “The Human,” from the portfolio Out of Chaos (2012), lithograph Larry Rivers (artist) and Frank O’Hara (writer), “Stones” (1956), portfolio with 13 lithographs published by Universal Limited Art EditionsFerlinghetti for San Francisco continues at the Legion of Honor (100 34th Avenue, San Francisco, California) through July 19, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Natalia Lauricella and Mauro Aprile Zanetti.