Last Thursday and Friday of 2012

Chor Boogie

Chor Boogie’s great mural at the entrance to Clarion Alley at Valencia Street frightens me. The level of raw emotional content on display is too much for this cubicle warrior with a part-time camera and a hankering for “meaning…”

And yet every time I walk past “Opium Horizons” I can’t take my eyes off it… I’m hypnotized… the creepy isolation of the opium scenes in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” pops into my mind and gets the imagination going (even though it’s been over twenty years since I’ve seen the film)… and it’s all downhill from there. And yet I’ve already taken several hundred photos of this mural under every type of light and weather (although I never have and never would use a flash on it)… I’ve also noticed more than a few visitors to Clarion photographing themselves and their friends in front of it.

I tend to be less frightened by Chor Boogie’s mural on Market Street near 6^th Street, though the huge eyes might suggest the ease by which modern technology fits into the criteria of law-enforcement types who must crawl all over everyone’s business to make sure we’re all “safe,” as in Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.”

SF Mural Arts lists five existing murals for Chor Boogie, and I can’t wait for others to appear.  Somehow this number seems rather low for someone with his talent. In fact, it’s almost a crime that there aren’t more in The City.

Unfortunately some Boogie murals have “disappeared” as if in disagreement with a faceless ruling class that fears art “not boxed” and without entrance fees… wiped out before I could stand before them with my camera… a great loss.

Go West on 24th & Mission Young (& Old) Street Art Lovers

Balmy Street probably get 60% of the big media attention focused on street art in San Francisco, and perhaps justifiably so. Clarion Alley possibly gets 38%, leaving about 2% to divide among the rest of a city often described as the Mural capital of the modern world.

These are my own perceptions and not a scientific study, but so many good locations for street art remain hidden that I thought I’d reveal an obvious one that even hardcore street art lovers may not have explored.

Just west of the BART Station on 24^th Street and Mission, you’ll find 3 “art alleys” worth exploring; Poplar, Osage and Orange. While these small streets are not quite as packed as Balmy or Clarion, what you find here (between 24^th and 26^th Street) will surprise you and may even put a smile on your face.

The handshake between formal mural and legal graffiti is carefully explored, though less intensely than at Lilac or Clarion… but pieces like Chris Makanna’s “In Dog We Trust” at Poplar makes this little walk well worth your time and shoe leather.

Osage features the A.G.Oner classic below, as well as the sexiest girl with a camera you’ll ever see on an alley.

This triumvirate of public art walls are also a safe enough walk for the older street art lovers that are concerned with the many sidewalk cracks and mini-pot-holes that have plagued The City of late.

By comparison to Balmy and Lilac (on the other side of Mission Street) there isn’t as much work at these locations, but you’ll also find the great Zio Ziegler piece on Bartlett near 24^th Street, which is required viewing… and a feast.

I’m not suggesting that you skip the obvious (Balmy & Lilac) but that you also take the road less… well, you know, traveled by the media.

The Most Funkadelic “San Francisco Street Art Thumbnails Gallery” In The World!

Thinking about how to organize my photographs of street art in San Francisco into a coherent web site lead me to the obvious; organize by location.

The City features numerous “locations” with many more sub-locations spread out… for example, the Mission District includes many key sub-locations such as:

Balmy, Clarion Alley, West of Mission & 24^th Street, Lilac, Bryant at 18^th, Florida at 17^th, and so on. These are complete and individual street-canvas-locations where street artists leave their mark on the world.

Some of these are obvious, and others would surprise you. So far the site includes 17 sub-location galleries in the Mission District alone. And I’m not done yet.

Eventually I wanted to also provide the option of seeing work organized by the artists’ names, and that’s part of the discussion right now behind the scenes at Graffiti SF Dot Com Headquarters. I always found this feature of SF Mural Arts an attractive one. Of course, you have to know the artist’s name to start off, and I don’t always know this until much later.

Seeing how I photograph the same artist’s work at the various locations seems important to my… let’s call it “creative growth.”

I could also see the value in organizing street art by “type;” spray-painted mural, artist’s mural, feel-good-“by-committee”-mural, youth street art, creative graffiti, destructive graffiti, political street art… and so on.

I rejected the “type” option after recognizing that one of the advantages of street art over museum art is the unexpected mixing of styles and approaches… there is no “Impressionist Wing” on the streets of San Francisco, and no “Armand Hammer Wing” at Clarion Alley.  

And then there’s the fact that “types” can be based on a viewer’s point of view… someone’s “creative” graffiti is someone else’s “destructive” graffiti… just as someone’s beautiful mural is someone else’s junk. (The same ideology can be inferred on museum work, but we give in to the “experts” that “know” what’s good for us and have chosen to display it so carefully.)

Then there’s the added factor that I don’t always know about the legitimacy of a piece of public art, and I’m sometimes surprised.  

One thing seems certain, whatever choice I make, in time other choices will walk up and introduce themselves. Sometimes politely.

I finally decided to organize the image folders by location, and made the initial galleries location-based. My thinking being that once the image location was settled, I could later create additional gallery pages by artist or any other category I chose to add more ways to view the available works.

Sometimes an evolving web site is like a growing child, with each new discovery leading to change-ripples throughout… or you could just blame it on bad planning.

The thumbnails page had its growing pains, to be sure, but it evolved into something close to what I’d been imagining. 

Even though the grouping is neither scientific nor geographical but colorful, chaotic and beautifully unpredictable, you can click on something you like to open a larger view… once there you can use the navigation system provided at the bottom of the page to see more from that location, or you can return to the Thumbnails page.

At the time of this writing there are 111 thumbnails on the page… and this number is likely to grow.  Eventually I may decide to split the Thumbnails Gallery into 2 pages… I don’t want Jakob Nielsen angry with me.

Some street art images easily lend themselves to thumbnail-abstraction. You don’t really have to crop, just shrink, while others are more problematic, though I’ve learned to think of these as “creative challenges…” and not problems.

That’s why the thumbnails have different widths but the same height… symmetry can be stimulating, but it is often overrated.  

I’ve made more traditional thumbnail galleries elsewhere…

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.