Art - The Streets

Ocean Beach Neighbors Look to Legalize Graffiti

Ocean Beach's sea wall has been long host to criminal artwork, from the beautifully whimsical to the titillatingly juvenile (above).  But under a proposal by a neighborhood marketing company looks to make it all legitimate—a Clarion Alley by the sea, of sorts.  SF Weekly reports:

Their project proposes to turn the graffiti-covered walls on Ocean Beach into a public art space where residents and visitors alike can legally leave their mark on the city…

The agency hopes to turn Ocean Beach into a worldwide and family-friendly graffiti hotspot à la Venice Beach in Southern California.

Their associated petition campaign is crawling along, with only 136 people thus far endorsing the project.  But perhaps it should project should move forward anyway, given the wall's current hot spot status.

Mona Caron's "Manifestation Station" Seized by Muni, Could Be Destroyed

Mona Caron's brilliant futurist utility box, which was reported destroyed on Friday by Mission Mission, has been found in captivity in an “anonymous-looking” MTA building in the northeast corner of the Mission.  The reason?  Graffiti.  This utility box was graffiti.

Thanks for cleaning up the streets, Muni!

UPDATE: Paul Rose of SFMTA writes in:

The controller box was replaced after the completion of the Church & Duboce Rail Replacement project, as part of a system-wide upgrade of various electrical sectionalized switches and associated controller boxes. The urgency of replacing the switches was made apparent after the nine day shutdown at Church and Duboce, when one of the switches failed shortly after it was re-energized. To upgrade the switch at Church & Duboce, the associated painted box also had to be replaced. We are working to have the box re-painted by the artist. We anticipate this process will be complete within the next 3 months.

[via Hugh D'Andrade]

Jeremy Fish on Euthanizing Silly Pink Bunny: "He Deserves to be Put Out of His Fucking Misery"

Jeremy Fish's Silly Pink Bunny statue has gone for one wild ride over the last month.  When it was announced on August 12th that Silly would be demolished to make way for a new LGBT senior housing complex, Lower Haighters bemoaned the loss of an icon that has welcomed people to the neighborhood for the last three years.  So it wasn't that much of a surprise when, three weeks later, “four or five dudes with good intentions ran off with the bunny in a U-Haul truck,” as Jeremy later recounted.

Despite being stolen in the middle of the afternoon—and while security was guarding the site that hosted the 600-pound statue—there were no immediate leads.  But after hitting up his contacts (“guys who know sketchy guys”), Jeremy eventually tracked it down to the back patio of Emperor Norton's Boozeland, the well intentioned Tenderloin bar owned by a team of guys with a long history of preserving San Francisco iconography facing impending doom.

It seemed as though the community had rallied around saving Silly Pink Bunny, and that Emperor Norton's had stepped up for its preservation.  But Jeremy still has Silly's destruction planned for this Friday.

When we reached out to him to confirm if he was actually going through with the beloved statue's demolition, he was unequivocal:

Yes. Why? Because he is really fucked up, and like a wounded soldier, a sick old dog, or a worn out racehorse, he deserves to be put out of his fucking misery. He got smashed, punched, hated, tagged, painted, then repainted. He got lit on fire. The back was wide open, and as a result spiders moved in the exposed foam, and started a black widow colony. Human beings used him as a toilet hundreds of times. He lost an eye, and a tooth. His head has a huge hole in the top from people climbing up and down him to get in to the elevated crack den called “the treehouse” above the statue. Then it was stolen, and the thieves painfully cut two feet off the back of him. But, most importantly, I paid for the materials to make the bunny, sculpted it, stuck it there, painted and maintained it as best I could, and I want to watch it get smashed. It was only supposed to be there for a year, and it turned into three years. Let's just say I'm satisfying my artistic vision on this project. If you want to save it, make your own damn statue.

Okay then!

The funeral goes down this Friday the 13th (spooky!) at 6pm.  Rumor has it there will be a wrecking ball on the scene.

(And fear not, nostalgic human beings and black widow spiders: Jeremy has been commissioned to erect a 10-foot tall bronze bunny statue at the site of the housing complex.)

New York-Style Yarn Bombing Comes to Divisalencia

Divisadero, always biting post-hip Valencia's style, is now host to a crocheted mannequin staring longingly at Bean Bag Cafe. How whimsical!

The bench-perched fright was fabricated by famed New York yard artist (yartist?) Olek, who also gave the knit treatment to the Doggie Diner Heads while in town.

Of course, this means we're going to start seeing yarn bombers covering actual humans in excruciatingly itchy outfits any day now, which just seems rude.

[Photo by The Fuck?]

Pop-Up Electric Chaircuts: Now a Thing

In what I can only assume was a ploy to raise money for a Burning Man ticket, Nelson, a barber-cum-noise rocker, plopped down Electric Chaircut haircut station at the corner of 20th and Alabama Saturday afternoon for one of the most befuddled and well-groomed acts of performance art we've seen in some time.

The concept was simple: in exchange for audience tips, Nelson would tape some fucked bastard's eyes and mouth shut, properly secure him to a folding chair, then go to work on his mop with his electric razor hooked up to an amplifier.  The result was loud and weird:

This blogger unfortunately did not stick around long enough to listen to the screams of horror elicited from the victim's new do, but we can only assume the absence of mirrors was deliberate.

Feast Your Eyes on the Tamale Lady's Mural

It was just Tuesday when we watched paint dry as Megan Wilson, Jet Martinez, and Roisin Isner started work on their latest Clarion Alley mural, honoring the Tamale Lady.  From the looks of it, they've finished [Update: Roisin writes in, “The mural isn't done yet—Megan is still painting today. Keep an eye out, because the finished mural will include info about her fundraising.]:

And here's a close-up:

Looks great!

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