The Mission School (sometimes called "New Folk" [1] or "Urban Rustic" [2] ) is an art movement of the 1990s and 2000s, centered in the Mission District, San Francisco, California.
The Mission School (sometimes called "New Folk" [1] or "Urban Rustic" [2] ) is an art movement of the 1990s and 2000s, centered in the Mission District, San Francisco, California.
This movement is generally considered to have emerged in the early 1990s around a core group of artists who attended (or were associated with) San Francisco Art Institute. The term "Mission School", however, was not coined until 2002, in a San Francisco Bay Guardian article by Glen Helfand. [3]
The Mission School is closely aligned with the larger lowbrow art movement, and can be considered to be a regional expression of that movement. Artists of the Mission School take their inspiration from the urban, bohemian, "street" culture of the Mission District and are strongly influenced by mural and graffiti art, comic and cartoon art, and folk art forms such as sign painting and hobo art. [3] [4] These artists are also noted for use of non-traditional artistic materials, such as house paint, spray paint, correction fluid, ballpoint pens, scrapboard, and found objects. [5] Gallery work by these artists is often displayed using the "cluster method", in which a number of individual works (sometimes by different artists) are clustered closely together on a gallery wall, rather than the traditional gallery display method of widely separating individual works. [6]
Street art has always been an important part of the Mission School aesthetic. Several Mission School artists crossed over into San Francisco's burgeoning graffiti art scene of the 1990s, notably Barry McGee (who wrote under the name "Twist"), Ruby Neri (a.k.a. "Reminisce"), Dan "Plasma" Rauch, and Margaret Kilgallen (a.k.a. "Meta"). [7] [8]
Artists considered to be part of the Mission School (past or present) have included: [3] [4] [9] [10] [11]
The profiles of these artists were raised by the inclusion of the work of Barry McGee in the 2001 Venice Biennale [12] and the works of Chris Johanson and Margaret Kilgallen in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. [3] [13]
In 2003, not long after the term "Mission School" was coined, a panel at the Commonwealth Club of California named several emerging San Francisco artists as constituting a "New Mission School". These artists included Andrew Schoultz, Dave Warnke, Sirron Norris, Neonski, Ricardo, Damon Soule, Misk, and NoMe, though many of these artists do not embrace the "Mission School" label. [5]
The term Mission School has been criticized for being too geographically specific (many artists outside of San Francisco share this aesthetic, while others living in the Mission District do not), while at the same time being a vague catch-all, with many artists who are referred to as Mission School having a hard time seeing how they are part of this "school". [9] [14]
Galleries, museums, and sites closely associated with the Mission School include:
The Mission District, commonly known as the Mission, is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California. One of the oldest neighborhoods in San Francisco, the Mission District's name is derived from Mission San Francisco de Asís, built in 1776 by the Spanish. The Mission is historically one of the most notable centers of the city's Chicano/Mexican-American community.
Barry McGee is an American artist. He is known for graffiti art, and a pioneer of the Mission School art movement. McGee is known by his monikers: Twist, Ray Fong, Bernon Vernon, and P.Kin.
Margaret Leisha Kilgallen was a San Francisco Bay Area artist who combined graffiti art, painting, and installation art. Though a contemporary artist, her work showed a strong influence from folk art. She was considered a central figure in the Bay Area Mission School art movement.
Precita Eyes Muralists Association is a community-based non-profit muralist and arts education group located in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1977 by Susan and Luis Cervantes.
Rigo 23 is a Portuguese-born American muralist, painter, and political artist. He is known in the San Francisco community for having painted a number of large, graphic "sign" murals including: One Tree next to the U.S. Route 101 on-ramp at 10th and Bryant Street, Innercity Home on a large public housing structure, Sky/Ground on a tall abandoned building at 3rd and Mission Street, and Extinct over a Shell gas station. He resides in San Francisco, California.
Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP) is an artists' collective in San Francisco's Mission District. CAMP is a community, a public space, and an organizing force that uses public art as a means for supporting social, economic, racial, and environmental justice messaging and storytelling. The project is currently co-directed by Megan Wilson and Christopher Statton with a board of directors that includes Wilson, Statton, Shaghayegh Cyrous, Keyvan Shovir, Ivy McClelland, Kyoko Sato, Fara Akrami, Katayoun Bahrami, and Chris Gazaleh. Clarion Alley runs one block in San Francisco's inner Mission District between 17th and 18th streets and Mission and Valencia streets.
Ruby Rose Neri is an American visual artist, known for her work as a sculptor, and painter. She was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, drawing creative influence from her parents and their friends. Neri is both a painter and a sculptor, and has worked with a wide array of materials including clay, plaster, bronze, steel, fiberglass, glaze, acrylic, oil, and spray paint.
Chris Johanson is an American painter and street artist. He is a member of San Francisco's Mission School art movement.
The history of art in the San Francisco Bay Area includes major contributions to contemporary art, including Abstract Expressionism. The area is known for its cross-disciplinary artists like Bruce Conner, Bruce Nauman, and Peter Voulkos as well as a large number of non-profit alternative art spaces. San Francisco Bay Area Visual Arts has undergone many permutations paralleling innovation and hybridity in literature and theater.
Balmy Alley is a one-block-long alley that is home to the most concentrated collection of murals in the city of San Francisco. It is located in the south central portion of the Inner Mission District between 24th Street and Garfield Square. Since 1973, most buildings on the street have been decorated with a mural.
Scott Williams was an American artist best known for paintings made using stencils. He began working with stencils in the early 1980s, painting on walls, cars and the found paper and objects that accumulated in his studio. He has painted many murals in San Francisco and was dubbed by artist/writer Aaron Noble The Stencil Godfather of the Mission, where stencil graffiti is common. Williams has painted numerous murals in San Francisco, both indoors and out, including Armadillo's on Fillmore Street, Amoeba Records, Clarion Alley, Leather Tongue video, The Chamelleon bar, DNA Lounge, Burger Joint, Pedal Revolution, and The Lab. The preponderance of his work in the Mission and his ability to go back and forth from street to studio has led some people to see him as a forerunner of the Mission school, which coalesced 10 years after he began working in the neighborhood. Working outside the mainstream, Williams exhibited at alternative spaces throughout the 80s and 90s including Show and Tell Gallery, Altarpiece at the Offensive, Bibliomancy, the Adobe Bookstore and Southern Exposure. As curatorial awareness of Williams grew, he was invited to exhibit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Clarion Alley is a small street between Mission and Valencia Streets and 17th and 18th Streets in the Mission District in San Francisco, California. It is notable for the murals painted by the Clarion Alley Mural Project.
Megan Wilson is an American visual artist, writer, and activist based in San Francisco. Known for her large-scale installations, public projects, and street art, she incorporates a broad range of pop culture methodologies and aesthetics to address conceptual interests that include home, homelessness, social and economic justice, anti-capitalism, impermanence and generosity. Wilson's art practice is influenced by Buddhism and Vipassanā meditation, often creating work that is conceptually rooted in elements of these practices and that is intentionally ephemeral or given away.
Christopher Statton is an American artist and arts administrator, community activist, and philanthropist, and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Statton is best known for his role in establishing San Francisco's oldest continuously running theater, the Roxie Theater as a non-profit during his four-year tenure as executive director, 2010 – 2013. In 2013 he was awarded the Marlon Riggs Award by the San Francisco Film Critics Circle for “his significant contribution to San Francisco’s film community through the Roxie Theater over the past four years.” Ryan Coogler also received the award for his film Fruitvale Station. In 2013, San Francisco District 9 Supervisor David Campos awarded Statton with a Certificate of Honor for his “important and tireless work with the Roxie.” Statton resigned from the Roxie in 2013 due to health concerns.
Natasha Boas is a French-American contemporary art curator, writer, and critic. She has taught art history and curatorial studies at Yale, Stanford, and the San Francisco Art Institute. Her exhibition on the Modernist Algerian artist, Baya Mahieddine Baya: Woman of Algiers in 2018 at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University garnered her international critical attention. In 2017 she was featured in Lynn Hershman Leeson's Vertighost, playing the role of herself as an art historian. She also authored the Facebook Artist in Residence book on the recent history of Art and Technology in the Bay Area for the 5th anniversary of Facebook's artist-in-residency program. An adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts, she is an expert in the art of California countercultures, the modernist avant-garde, surrealist women artists, the Mission School and Outsider artists.
Alicia McCarthy is an American painter. She is a member of San Francisco's Mission School art movement. Her work is considered to have Naïve or Folk character, and often uses unconventional media like housepaint, graphite, or other found materials. She is based in Oakland, California.
Shaghayegh Cyrous (Persian: شقایق سیروس; is an American artist and curator based in Los Angeles. Her interactive time-based investigations, participatory projects, and video installations have been said to "create a poetic space for human connections."
Keyvan Heydari-Shovir, also known as CK1, is an Iranian-born contemporary artist, and street artist. His work combines Iranian traditional culture with contemporary pop culture, and he is a pioneer of Iranian graffiti art. He lives in Los Angeles, and previously lived in San Francisco and Tehran.
Sirron Norris is an American illustrator, muralist, and arts educator. He is known for his work on the FOX animated television show Bob's Burgers and for numerous cartoon-style public murals, including ones at Balmy Alley, Clarion Alley, and Mission Dolores Park, and galleries around San Francisco. His murals often include political messages, local themes, and his signature blue bear. He has worked with several local non-profits, including SPUR and El Tecolote.
The Luggage Store Gallery, also known as 509 Cultural Center, is a non-profit, multi-disciplinary arts organization founded in 1987, and has two venues located in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The organization has sponsored many local artists, including those that are considered to be part of the Mission School, and of skateboard or street art culture.
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