Little did I know when I opted to do a story on San Francisco street art that I would open up such a can of worms. There are murals, statues and/or sculptures, both inside and out, in every neighborhood of the City. San Francisco embraces street art as a means of enhancing the streetscape and creating visual markers of historical and cultural context. As far as I can determine, the City’s murals alone can be put into three categories: murals created during the Great Depression[1], murals created since the mid-1980s and graffiti. This post focuses on the second category: murals, or mural alleys, created since the mid-1980s.
Rigo 23 as he is now known, born Ricardo Gouveia in 1966, is a Portuguese muralist who moved to San Francisco in 1985. He received a BFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters in Fine Arts from Stanford. He has been commissioned by the City to do more than 20 murals, mostly located in SOMA[2]. In 1992 Rigo 23 and five other artists founded the Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP). Clarion Alley runs one block between 17th and 18th off of Mission. CAMP was inspired by the success of Balmy Alley[3] and the mural on the Women’s Building[4]. Balmy Alley is located off of Mission between 24th and 25th. Murals began to appear in this alley in the mid-1980s to express outrage over the human rights violations and political corruption in Central America. The Woman’s Building, located at 3543 18th Street, is the site of the Maestra Peace Mural, created in 1994 by seven multi-cultural, multi-generational female artists.
Clarion Alley has had more than 900 murals on display since its inception in 1992, and is an ongoing mural project focusing on “socially engaged and aesthetically innovative public art”. CAMP offers tours[5].
There is at least one mural, past or present, that graces every neighborhood of the City. There are over 450 murals in the Mission District alone. SOMA has 130. The Tenderloin has 100. The most comprehensive list of all existing murals that I have seen to date was generated by @brokeassstuart[6]. My personal favorites are the mosaic murals, and they are not in short supply. There is the mural on the Masonic Auditorium, the one on the Marina Safeway, and Gateway to the Pacific Basin at 98 W Portal.
There are rules for creating murals. Any mural placed on City-owned property, or any mural financed with City funds, must first be approved by the San Francisco Arts Commission[7]. The San Francisco Planning Commission[8] offers a pamphlet for rules about placing murals on private property.
[1] The Great Depression: see story coming October 11th
[2] South of Market: https://thesanfranciscophoenix.com/?p=4109
[3] Visit them at https://balmyalley.org
[4] Visit them at https://womensbuilding.org
[5] Visit them at https://clarionalleymuralproject.org
[6] Visit his website at https://brokeassstuart.com
[7] Visit them at www.sfartscommission.org
[8] Visit them at www.sf-planning.org
