SF Mural Arts - A Site for Mural Lovers

If you’re serious about street art in San Francisco, you have to check out “SFMural Arts”, one of the best sites I’ve found for murals in The City.

Once there you can search by artist name or look at murals in specific neighborhoods, and you can generate a “walking” list that will help you find your chosen murals in the real world.

Untitled by Rone | Larkin Street at Geary

Type in the name of your favorite SF muralist on the conveniently placed search box and you’ll get a page (or pages) with thumbnails of the artist’s murals. Click on the thumbnail to look at larger photos of the mural.

Of course, there’s no way that even SF Mural Arts can keep up with the hectic pace of street art production and destruction taking place in The City. Yet the site is updated frequently, so you may discover that a certain mural you’d love to see is “no longer available.”  But you may also discover that your favorite muralist has other pieces you’ve never seen, and these may even be located near you.

  There’s no graffiti anywhere (proving that nobody’s perfect) and I’m not sure the word is even mentioned… but as a mural lover, this resource for local murals and muralists is incredibly useful and user-friendly.

If, for some reason, your favorite mural doesn’t appear on the site, you can take a picture of it and submit it. Or if you can’t, feel free to send me an email and let me know… I’m always looking for street art I may have missed, and I will submit it to the site afterwards.

There are other sites that cover street art in San Francisco with equal love and passion, such as streetartsf, which includes pictorials and interviews with artists such as Amanda Lynn, and a section called On The Street.

Thanks to sites such as these, and graffitisf.com, you can now get your fix of SF street art even if it’s raining out and you don’t want to get wet. Of course, nothing beats a close encounter of the third kind.

Art With Heart

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… a younger, more optimistic version of your humble host and narrator was temporarily involved with an idealistic non-profit gallery-alternative-space known as Cameravision.

Aside from regular exhibitions and lectures, Cameravision featured a weekly gathering called “Exchange;” an open ritual of babble, coffee, wine and two-dimensional work-in-progress-artworks opened to visual artists from any medium with a working project they were willing to share and discuss.

The one rule that most of the meeting’s facilitators insisted on was that we would not approach the question of “what is art,” focusing instead on the creator’s objectives and feelings about the work being shared.

Each meeting featured a different collection of visual artists sharing complete or evolving projects with a small group of curious participants, most of which were teachers, students or photographers.  At any given Exchange you could be exploring creative projects in photography or collage, photo-montage or even sculpture. Sometimes one after the other.

On some nights only a few regulars showed up, but on others lots of newbies were there, making each week unpredictable, stimulating and expansive… like a stroll through Clarion Alley after lunch on a warm cloudy day. Today it may seem odd that different creative disciplines would gather to speak with each other.

Eventually Cameravision disappeared into the era of post-Reagan conservatism, along with common sense and whatever was left of our good manners. But the left-over benefits of avoiding that question of “what is art” helped me years later as I began to photograph street art in San Francisco.

What excites me is not the formal classification of a specific street art piece, or the tools used in its creation, or the work’s dubious legal status, or even the artist’s standing in the art world or police line-up. What matters is the message, and the heart and soul of the work... and the work’s effect on the location; it’s “aura.”

 Does it invite or defy? Does it tell a story? Does it challenge or support an idea? Does it provide some form of value that I’m not able to appreciate? Street art in San Francisco tends to have a lot of heart and soul.

Formal mural or illegal graffiti are often just sides of a coin… just because something’s “legal” doesn’t make it worthy.  It seems odd to also assume the opposite.

AMANDA LYNN’S STREET WOMEN

Nobody paints women on the streets of San Francisco like Amanda Lynn… her women are just as mysterious, sexy and feminine as they are delicate and strong; and as mythical and fantastical as they are real and grounded.  Yet they remain as sexy and playful as they are independent and unpredictable... sophisticated street ladies of day and night that glow by sunlight, moonlight and street light.  And did I say sexy?

Lynn’s murals can be found all over The City, but there’s a healthy concentration of her works in the Duboce/Valencia area well worth the 3-block stroll north from the 16^th Street BART Station.

On the corner of Valencia and Duboce Avenue, Lynn’s “Sultry Sins” stands out even in fog and heavy traffic. A short block away on Clinton Park, across from the White Wall is one of my favorite Street Art Woman of all time, maybe because she looks ready to start flapping to the sounds of Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five…  

Further down the street and away from Valencia are various other murals that make Clinton Park a legitimate street art gallery of note.

Back on Duboce and Valencia, and a half-block down towards Mission Street, tucked into a fenced parking lot is a major collaboration with Lady Mags… Flora N Fauna seems to change colors according to the light of day and is worth experiencing in person even when the lot is full.

On 18^th Street near Mission, “Sunday Flamenco” (top) reigns over its locality like royalty over the old world, and I can’t imagine that wall with anything else on it even though I know I photographed it before the dancer appeared.

There are other Lynn murals in the area… one on Florida between 18^th and 17^th and a smaller piece on Alabama and 22^nd Street.  

Then there’s the one on Florida between 17^th and 18^th Street.

Further north, on Mission and 9^th, in the South of Market District, is the gorgeous “Finer Things.” I heard somewhere that this corner will succumb to the “construction” disease going around The City, so if you want to see this in person, you better get there soon.

SF Mural Arts lists a total of 38 murals by Amanda Lynn. Of those, 11 are no longer available due to unexplained mural-death, and of the 27 that remain I’ve photographed 16… and counting.

Most the Amanda Lynn murals that I’ve captured so far are featured in the graffitisf.com Amanda Lynn Gallery.