Tag: stencils

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Stencil Archive: redesigned for tablets n phones

The Internet look is all about flat. So I cleaned up the Stencil Archive logo for the 2014 redesign
The Internet look is all about flat. So I cleaned up the Stencil Archive logo for the 2014 redesign

HappyFeet’s sister site, Stencil Archive, continues to thrive amongst the street art webstreams. HappyFeet began in 2002 when my stencil photograph selection grew to a point where I felt the need to scan and upload to share and share alike. Last week, Stencil Archive saw the 20,000th uploaded photo, which has been dwarfed in size by corporate sites like Flickr. Back in 2002, a simple Google search brought up maybe 6 sites, none of which were covering the growing, pre-Banksy scene. Stencil Archive met the need and many sites soon followed. Now they are all vaguely “street art” sites. Stencil Archive is still 100% all about stencils!

While the photo uploads ticked to 20k, I was working on a site redesign with Justin Fraser at Mission Web Works. No one buys computers or laptops anymore, right? Then why the hell isn’t Stencil Archive easy to see and navigate for all the smart phones and tablets out there? Justin and I took care of this major barrier to enjoying the site. Apple’s Jony Ive really pumped up the flat design craze with iOS7, so I redid the Stencil Archive logo, favicon, and homepage icon (yep, you can save a cool app-like button on your phone’s homepage to easily access the stencils) for this 2014 reboot. Continue reading “Stencil Archive: redesigned for tablets n phones”

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Farewell CELLspace; Farewell Murals

I spraypainted Scot t Williams's huge gorilla on the back door of CELL.in 2010. It is gone (as is the piece that replaced it) due to tagging.
I spraypainted Scott Williams’s huge gorilla on the back door of CELL.in 2010. It is gone (as is the piece that replaced it) due to tagging.

Almost to the day today, I arrived in San Francisco in 1997 with two suitcases (one full of camping gear) and a vague idea of what I wanted to accomplish in the City by the Bay. The words that kept bouncing around in my head were: diversity, creativity, and adventure. I had no idea there as a dot com boom and that the vacancy rate was under 1%. I didn’t even know what a vacancy rate was! I did know that I wanted to be part of something amazing, and if possible, somehow create amazing cultural bits that others enjoyed.

In 1998, I started volunteering for CELLspace, which at the time was a funky underground artist warehouse with folks who had a similar vision that the one I was chewing on. Years later, I tried to move on and open my time and life up to other amazing projects. So CELL got put on the backburner, until 2008. That was a crucial year for CELL, now a nonprofit with paid employees. While on the road touring for the book and for the Conscious Carnival, word started getting back to me that CELL was financially imploding. I wasn’t surprised.

Then I got a call from Jane and Tony Verma, two long-time Metal Shop artists, asking me to help them curate a stencil exhibit on the facade of CELL. Things were bad at the time and CELL’s doors were shut (all the employees and most of management were very far away from the space) due to no one being there to maintain and run things. But the Metal Shop was still holding their cluster together. The Metal Shop designed and built an amazing metal window-covering mural, complete with space in the bottom for showing art. They had reached out to a few artists in Stencil Nation, but needed more. Stencilada was born, and thus began my final run of volunteering for CELL. Continue reading “Farewell CELLspace; Farewell Murals”

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Tour Makes SF Weekly’s 2013 Best Of

 

SFWeekly Best Of

 Best Way to see the Mission Before it’s Annexed to Google – 2013

Scout for Street Art Walking Tour

http://Vayable.com

Russell Howze describes his tour as a “three hour zigzag through the Mission District.” For fans of street art, or anyone curious about the changing city, it’s a zigzag worth taking. Howze has been chronicling the stencils, tags, murals and graffiti that decorate San Francisco for 15 years, and is the author of the street art tome Stencil Nation. His tour explores alleys that will be new to residents and tourists alike, and keeps an eye on the shifting cultural tides of the neighborhood. “Urban landscapes are always changing,” Howze said, pointing out that while many of the tech workers moving into the Mission appreciate street art, they also bring security cameras and fences.

2013 SF Weekly Best Of Winner....
2013 SF Weekly Best Of Winner….
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Old Bid-ness… Stencils and Friends

In the Facebook worlds, posting all this stuff is instant, and friends find things and post them. I take the trouble to pull things off of there for the Stencil Archive, my own archives, etc. and then maybe, just maybe, post it on here. I forget that some friends don’t do Facebook! And I have to remind myself that this blog belongs to me, as opposed to a multi-billion dollar corporation that is currently dot com booming the Bay Area. This site is also a great, long archive of my life here in San Francisco.

So back in late January, Regan Ha-Ha Tamanui stopped over on his way back to New Zealand and Australia. He’d been traveling the world for a year, but got stuck in Berlin for eight months. How unlucky. I got him four walls here in SF, and he took my photo after a day of wandering around the Tenderloin looking at street art. He cut a stencil portrait out of that photo, as well as the photo he took of my friend Monica that evening in Hayes Valley.

Icy and Sot, expats from Iran who now live in Brooklyn (leave Iran to have a street art show, go back to Iran and get arrested for satanism) were driving through. They all took my tour and I got them two walls to paint on. Regan collaborated with them. Icy and Sot came back to SF for an art show at a Noise Pop concert. I missed it (always seem to miss the good art shows!).

Here are photos from early Feb, with the stencil portraits thrown in.

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SF Chron: SF murals become targets for vandals

S.F. NEIGHBORHOODS Graffiti marring much of city’s street art – vandalism on the rise
Matthai Kuruvila
Published 4:54 pm, Thursday, December 27, 2012


Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/SF-murals-become-targets-for-vandals-4150191.php#ixzz2GeFBUSjw

Muralists around San Francisco say that they’ve seen an increase in vandalism of murals by taggers, who are defacing the art with their monikers.
Vandals have wrecked murals from North Beach to the Tenderloin. In the city’s liveliest mural zone, the Mission District, muralists say it’s been particularly bad. Street paintings made in months have been ravaged in seconds.

“There’s been a very specific mural destruction going on,” said Russell Howze, a muralist and author who does street art tours of the Mission District. “There’s really no logic. I don’t know if there’s any organization or conspiracy behind it. More than anything, these murals are well-loved and huge amounts of time have gone into them.”

Vandals this year have defaced parts of the Mission District’s Clarion Alley, a 20-year-old street museum of murals. “Gold Mountain,” a North Beach mural depicting Chinese history, had to be repainted when the building owners couldn’t keep it free of graffiti.

Continue reading “SF Chron: SF murals become targets for vandals”

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San Francisco’s Street Art

The Mission District: San Francisco’s Street Art

16 December 2012
Hanna Wolf
From the Fair Observer (link here)

Street Art – The Fun Loving Criminals?
For many decades, street artists have made San Francisco’s Mission District one of the most colourful and fascinating places to see [7], mirroring the city’s vibrant multiculturalism and diversity.

We are walking through some of the stinkiest alleys in San Francisco, yet still tourists from all over the world come here to take pictures and admire the street art gallery surrounding them. Whether huge murals, stickers on the floor or graffiti: art is all around in this area of the city.

Our tour guide Russell Howze, who offers street art tours through the Mission District, has been walking through these alleys for 15 years, and still he discovers new pieces. “Once you train your eyes, it’s everywhere” is what he tells us as he points at a street light covered with almost torn off stickers and scribbled words, which would normally never catch someone’s eyes as art.

The Higher, the Better

Walking through Mission and Valencia Street we come across walls with both illegal and legal graffiti, stencils and other street art styles. Comics as well as posters and abstract pieces look down on us from the left as we try to read a graffiti on the right. Unlike in European metropolises, in San Francisco trains are no major hotspots for graffiti. The sprayers here prefer trucks instead and almost every truck we pass during the tour wears at least a small graffiti tag.

Continue reading “San Francisco’s Street Art”