Clarion Alley San Francisco
I am someone who loves museums and libraries, the quiet, the calm, and the prevailing sense of order under the guidance of history.
I am also someone who loves street art. . .playful, political, pretty, or polarized. . .one of my greatest enjoyments in life is walking around a corner and coming across a piece of artwork. I find the nexus of the street a fascinating arena of human interaction, the rush of people, the infighting over advertising, the ubiquitous signs and postings, all taken in without much pause. . . stop, go, do not enter. It is like an invisible dome instructing our thoughts that once learned plays unobtrusively in the back of our minds.
Street arts’ content varies the globe over but like humans in general in our ‘second’ millennial existence, and the artists who are its task masters, street art travels, shifting and transforming much like culture itself. On some levels, street art to me is like a living art form energized by the arena that it mimics.
Anyways, just some opening thoughts for now. . .there’s always plenty of discussion to return to in this area of art production.
Clarion Alley San Francisco
Spreading across a back alley in the Mission District, a tour of Clarion Alley is like an extra special Sunday treat. On my last visit, locals and visitors alike meandered down the adjoining walkway, taking in what is almost attune to a sensory overload (much like city-life itself) as the murals merge into each other across doorways and over the ground itself.
Works range from political allegory, to pop, to abstraction, to the whimsical—a blaring mash of colour against the grey fog of the San Francisco sky.
From the number of people mulling about camera/phone ready and chatting amongst each other, you can tell that the alley is a destination art route, and its own open-air exhibition space. In a day and age when advertising reigns supreme it’s a nice change of pace to take in artwork unmediated at the very least by the larger media.
For more on the artists shown here and San Francisco’s murals overall visit: http://www.sfmuralarts.com.
SF, June 2014
