Eli Leon – poster artist
Lincoln Cushing, 11/16/2025
The stunning display at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives “Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California” is an homage to culture production as community building. But few know that the "quirky" Jewish psychotherapist from the Bronx who built this collection of over 3,000 quilts was himself was a poster artist during the late 1960s, was active in the alternative schools movement that followed the Free Speech Movement, and gathered witness statements during People’s Park (1969). Tom Dalzell’s 2017 Quirky Berkeley article covered some of this, but Leon’s 2020 SF Chronicle obituary did not. Eli's interest in the quilts can be read in this 2005 Berkeley Daily Planet article.
I was proud to have included Leon's artwork in my 2012 OMCA exhibition "All of us or None: Social Justice Posters of the San Francisco Bay Area" and Heyday catalog. In 2005 poster guru Michael Rossman emailed me:
One day, I found a clutch of posters at a yard sale so rich that I tracked down the artist, Eli Leon. They were mostly from the Free University of Berkeley, which flourished in the late 1960s. Since I manage a vast political poster archive, I was tickled to come upon them, and then to find Leon who, to my disappointment, had quit doing posters. He was now collecting multitudes of African-American quilts. But how neat it was, to meet someone else nutty enough to collect something seriously that mostly was passed over. And what a storage problem he had! For quilts were so much bulkier than posters. And those this fellow had gathered were loaded with history and such a wealth of graphic riches that my jaw dropped. Eli saw the same spirit of improvisation in this art form as in jazz, blues and gospel, derived presumably from African roots. And he has followed this recognition out concretely, in a long series of exhibits and writings, in an authoritative and generous career.
Here are several of Eli’s graphics.
Cover, UC Berkeley summer events booklet, 1967; cover, Free University of Berkeley, Fall supplement 1968
UC Berkeley Student Co-op, 1968; Visit University of California, Berkeley - Centennial 1868-1968
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“Milk in such containers may be unfit for human consumption” Ecology Center, 1969; Americans are 7% of the World’s Population and Use Over 50% of the World’s Raw Materials: What Are We Doing with It?” Ecology Center, 1969
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