Ravenswood Winery (poster)

Description:

David Lance Goines is known as a writer and lecturer as well as an illustrator and printer of both letterpress and offset lithography, his work much exhibited and collected throughout the country. But his Arts and Crafts influenced design is best known on his posters and in books. Goines was a recognized activist in Berkeley, associated with the Free Speech and Anti-War movements, and he did poster and book work for these movements.

Alice Waters, who founded the Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, was a founding inspiration of the fresh, local, and organic food movement. She met David Goines in the Berkeley Free Speech movement. They began to collaborate on a column, “Alice’s Restaurant” for the local alternative paper. She wrote the recipes and he provided the artwork. He collected and printed each column as Thirty Recipes for Framing and the entire set and individual prints from the set began to appear on Berkeley walls and beyond, establishing him with enough profits to buy the Berkeley Free Press, rechristened the St. Hieronymus Press.

He issued his first Chez Panisse poster, "Red-Haired Lady," in 1972 and his most recent, "41st Anniversary," in 2012. In between is a series of anniversary posters, plus occasional others celebrating the restaurant's book releases, such as the Chez Panisse Café Cookbook, and other ventures. These works established his place as the primary artist associated with food and wine in the so-called Gourmet Ghetto. His early posters for Chez Panisse were soon followed by requests from other food and wine related sites and events, as well as from many other commercial entities.

The 1976 logo for Ravenswood Winery shows three intertwined ravens in a triskelion on the label designed by Goines for the release of the winery’s first vintage of Zinfandel. Winemaker Joel Peterson, the founder of Ravenswood Winery, told the artist of something he experienced in harvesting his first vintage. Ravens were the vineyard protectors who cawed at him through his stormy, debut harvest. Years later, the image is well known from the wine label which has remained as Goines designed it in 1976 (number 83 in the Goines repertory), on what became one of the most popular wines in the country.

The label even inspires tattoos. Peterson says that anyone showing up at the winery with a tattoo of said Ravenswood/Goines image will receive tastings of the wine free. Since 2008, every July the Winery holds a Tattoo Coming Out Party and Poetry Slam where people without permanent ink on their bodies can receive a temporary tattoo if they write a poem that “declares your love for tattoos, Ravens, or tattoos.”

Date Made: 1979

Maker: Goines, David Lance

Location: Currently not on view

Place Made: United States: California, San Francisco

See more items in: Work and Industry: Graphic Arts, Food, FOOD: Transforming the American Table 1950-2000, Communications, Advertising, Art

Exhibition:

Exhibition Location:

Data Source: National Museum of American History

Id Number: 2012.0169.01Accession Number: 2012.0169Catalog Number: 2012.0169.01

Object Name: printlithographObject Type: Lithograph

Physical Description: paper (overall material)ink (overall material)Measurements: overall: 61 cm x 41.7 cm; 24 1/32 in x 16 13/32 in

Guid: http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ng49ca746ad-836c-704b-e053-15f76fa0b4fa

Record Id: nmah_1425735

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