Twenty-five years ago San Francisco’s iconic City Lights Books initiated a bold project using a series of banners hung along the front of the bookstore. That 5-panel banner installation was the first in a series followed by a period during which founder poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti used the second-story windows of City Lights as a site for his own hand-painted messages in response to current events. In 2016, City Lights inaugurated a new banner series with new collaborators, and they intend to continue activating our building as a public platform, a forum to inspire and provoke thoughtful civic engagement.

“Tyranny cuts off the singer’s head / But the voice from the bottom of the well / Returns to the secret springs of the earth / And rises out of nowhere through the mouths of the people”

–Pablo Neruda, translated by Alistair Reid

June 2003, Photograph © Larry Keenan