Harold LaVigne

Harold LaVigne settled in San Francisco in 1957, and along with his brother, Robert, became part of the creative ferment of the Bay Area counterculture. He kept company with a circle of artists and poets that included Rick Barton (1928-1992), Byron Hunt (1905-1993), and David Nelson (b. 1941). In 1965 LaVigne opened a short-lived gallery called Joker's Flux on Fillmore Street. Between 1965 and 1971 he operated Running Elk Press, which published print portfolios, including his own Persons (1966) and The Penis is an Angry Face (1967) by Barton and Nelson, both in the Morgan collection. Barton trained LaVigne in his distinctive style of line drawing, which LaVigne took up in earnest. He is distinguished from Barton by his frequent inclusion of female subjects, as in this six-foot-long accordion-fold book. He marked his drawings with a red chop of a running elk, his totem. LaVigne remained in the Bay Area for a little over a decade, later settling in Carson City, Nevada, where he taught art at Western Nevada College for twenty-five years.