Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo

San Francisco's unique Mission District, a haven for street art - and art in general for that matter, contains the world's largest concentration of public paintings. The vibrant Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo (Annice Jacoby) explores and showcases the district's street art - an array of boldly painted images and murals that embody and embrace activism, culture, passion and the desire for social change.

During the early 1970s the city's legendary Mission District transformed into an art epicenter - crossing popular culture, fine art, and political audiences. "Mission Muralismo," as the movement is termed, is an ongoing and ever-changing movement that combines elements of Mexican mural painting, surrealism, pop art, urban punk, eco-warrior, cartoon and guerilla graffiti that has catapulted many San Francisco artists into the spotlight of the international art world.

The book, which features over 500 full-color photographs, also contains in-depth commentary by artists who have been part of "Mission Muralismo" and that of Mission-savvy writers. The 30 essays expose the 3+ decades of the expansive public art movement of San Francisco. Among others, R. Crumb, Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Barry McGee (TWIST), Rigo and Spain Rodriguez, have commented on street art and the movement in Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo. Additionally, the book contains a forward by Grammy Award Winner Carlos Santana, who states,

"The whole Mission neighborhood is a massive public artwork, both sacred and profane, brimming with graff and goddesses."

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"Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art"

The term "Pop Art" is defined as a visual art movement that challenged tradition (first during the mid-1950s in Britain and then in the late 1950s in the U.S.) by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art. Case in point: the most well-known American Pop Artist, Andy Warhol, silk-screened a seemingly non-iconic image of a Campbell's soup can onto a canvas and voila, the public became fascinated with the Campbell's Soup image (and the product itself).

As a recent review from the NY Times discusses, James Rosenquist penned "Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art," an autobiography about the artist's accidental status as a pop artist (as a Midwest painter whose work happens to thematically parallel that of Warhol). Rosenquist started his art career as a sign painter and didn't initially meet Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein until 1964 (after Warhol and Lichtenstein had individually developed their avant-garde styles).

The artist's book contains a detailed biography (including his various art-world experiences), along with photographs (like the one below of the artist standing with his proud mother below his first billboard painting - for Coca-Cola), and various anecdotes. Rosenquist acquired the assistance of David Dalton (a founding editor of Rolling Stone Magazine) as well as Tony Scherman (a veteran music journalist) on his book.



To read the entire article from the NY Times - including more about Rosenquist's autobiography and life, art critic Arthur C. Danto's new pop-art related book, and discussion on new definitions / explanations of "Pop Art," click here.