Clarion Alley is a small street in San Francisco between Mission and Valencia Streets and 17th and 18th Streets, notable for the murals painted by the Clarion Alley Mural Project.
Clarion Alley is a small street in San Francisco between Mission and Valencia Streets and 17th and 18th Streets, notable for the murals painted by the Clarion Alley Mural Project.
Originally called "Cedar Lane," the alley's name was changed around the turn of the twentieth century to Clarion Alley. [1] The street is notable for community and arts activity, including the Clarion Alley Mural Project, the American Indian Center [2] and Promotoras Latinas Comunitarias de Salud. [3]
The warehouse at 47 Clarion was originally known as the Woodmen Building with the main door at 3345 17th Street. It was an IWW meeting hall, where Tom Mooney once attempted to organize railway workers. [4] [5] [6] Later, it was home to artists and musicians from at least the early sixties through 2002. [7] [8] Notable residents included Terry Riley, The Cockettes, Lise Swenson of Artists' Television Access, and two of the artists, Rigo 23 and Aaron Noble, who were founding members of the Clarion Alley Mural Project. 47 Clarion was demolished in 2001, and a parking lot for the condominium project on 17th Street replaced it. It became a symbol of the neighborhood's gentrification.
Since 1992, the alley has been covered in murals painted by the Clarion Alley Mural Project. Alley residents Noble and Rigo together painted the mural "Superhero Warehouse" showing a series of depressed superheroes on the warehouse's side, as a contribution to the mural project. Another of the early murals, painted by Scott Williams after research done by Fred Rinne, depicted native animals of the Mission District.
Clarion Alley was featured in the opening chapter of the fiction novel Dog Days by John Levitt. The main character is ambushed by evil forces that animate one of the murals into a monstrous force. [9]
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 center of the city's Chicano/Mexican-American community.
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.
The Mission School is an art movement of the 1990s and 2000s, centered in the Mission District, San Francisco, California.
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. The mission of CAMP is to support and produce socially engaged and aesthetically innovative public art, locally and globally as a grassroots artist-run organization. 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, 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.
The Redstone Building, also known as the Redstone Labor Temple, was constructed and operated by the San Francisco Labor Council Hall Associates. Initial planning started in 1910, with most construction work done during 1914. Its primary tenant was the San Francisco Labor Council, including 22 labor union offices as well as meeting halls. The building was a hub of union organizing and work activities and a "primary center for the city's historic labor community for over half a century."
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 is 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.
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.
Mission Muralismo was an artistic movement that brought awareness of issues as well as depicted everyday life as lived by the people in the San Francisco Mission District and other barrios around the world. The Mission was an artistic playground for muralists to speak out about injustices and social issues around their city, the country and the world. Latin American muralists voiced their cries for international attention and aimed to create awareness for the social and political problems of Latin America through the murals they painted. The Nicaraguan community especially contributed to artistic projects to shed light on the Nicaraguan Revolution and their struggles from 1979 to the 1990s.
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.
Tamara Ching is an American trans woman and San Francisco Bay Area transgender activist. Also known as the "God Mother of Polk [Street]", she is an advocate for trans, HIV, and sex work-related causes.
Daniel Doherty is a San Franciscan street artist. He is widely known for creating graffiti murals in the Mission District. Clarion Alley Mural Project participates in spreading awareness of heroes worldwide. Every year, 200,000 people visit these murals in San Francisco's Mission District. In 2011, Doherty painted an informative mural of Mohamed Bouazizi. The mural consists of a painting of Bouazizi surrounded by an explanation of how he became a catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution. Laura Lengel, author of "Symbolic Interaction and New Social Media," mention the significance of Doherty's mural of Mohamed Bouazizi. They describe Doherty's work of art as an "alternative offline media form." Doherty's mural educated each visitor about this Tunisian martyr while promoting local art, helping spread Bouazizi's actions worldwide. Doherty has created several murals that consist of a local homeless man. These images touch on social problems. In one of them titles "Everything Must Go!" a bookstore filled with books about San Francisco is going out of business. He has also captured a famous location in San Francisco, Dolores Park, where he used pointillism.
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.
Susan Kelk Cervantes is an American artist who has been at the epicenter of the San Francisco mural movement and the co-founder and executive director of the community-based non-profit, Precita Eyes Muralists.
Elba Rivera is a Salvadorian-born artist who concentrates on realism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism. Rivera focuses on uncovering subjects related with human's dismissal for nature with surrealist and abstract expressionist techniques. She is best known for her participation in San Francisco community mural art movements and for the art piece, Family Expectations, which depicts an intricate composition of several women whose appearances indicates family union.
Chuck Sperry is an American artist best known for his screen prints on paper and oak panel, his limited-edition rock posters for bands such as Widespread Panic and Pearl Jam, and his political protest art. Since 1985, Sperry's iconography has ranged from astronauts walking on the surface of the moon to portraits of performers as varied as Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and Chrissie Hynde. Beginning in 2010, many of Sperry's prints have featured images of female muses from Greek mythology.
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.
Irene Peréz is a muralist known for her membership in the Latina muralist group, Las Mujeres Muralistas and her contributions to the group mural Maestrapeace, at the Woman's Building in San Francisco, California.
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.
Route map:
...as the original 47 Clarion space that served as his home and studio was demolished in 2002.
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