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All on different trips: San Francisco's Mission School and the dot-com years

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ALL ON DIFFERENT TRIPS:

SAN FRANCISCO’S MISSION SCHOOL AND THE DOT-COM YEARS

by

Jacqueline Ann von Treskow

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

May 2012

Copyright 2012 Jacqueline Ann von Treskow
ii

Dedication

For those who are looking at the stars.

iii

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, my utmost gratitude to my thesis committee: to Karin Higa, Karen
Moss, and Glen Helfand for your encouragement, guidance and support.
Special thanks to Rhea Anastas and Noura Wedell for your keen critical insight
and thoughtful advice. Your sincerity and encouragement made completing this thesis
possible.
My gratitude to Julie Deamer, Jim Schatz, Darin Klein, Matthew Pawlowski,
Amanda Eicher, Scott Hewicker, and Mike Blockstein for sharing your memories with
me; they reinforced the importance of this project.
Thank you to my MPAS program comrades Emily Wilkerson, Adrienne White,
Sarah Loyer, Evelena Ruether, Gladys Hernando, Zachary Kaplan, Megan Sallabedra,
and Ilana Milch for completing this journey alongside me.
Thanks to Dawn Knopf for a friendship that I treasure, your thoughtful words of
advice, and lending your copy-editing prowess to this paper.
I owe my deepest gratitude to my family, for your unconditional love and support,
and for always telling me that I can accomplish whatever it is I put my mind to.
Last, but certainly not least, to my partner Andrew Clover. You have been my
biggest supporter. Thank you for always reminding me that love and laughter is what is
really important.
iv

Table of Contents

Dedication........................................................................................................................... ii

Acknowledgments.............................................................................................................. iii

Table of Contents............................................................................................................... iv

Abstract................................................................................................................................v

Introduction..........................................................................................................................1

Chapter 1: The Streets of the Mission: Where Art and Activism Meet...............................6

Chapter 2: Do-It-Yourself: Books, Zines, and Punk in the Mission..................................20

Chapter 3: The Dot-Com Boom: Redevelopment and Gentrification in the Mission .......28

Chapter 4: Artists Mobilize and an Art Scene Thrives......................................................44

Epilogue .............................................................................................................................67

Bibliography ......................................................................................................................70

Appendix: Images .............................................................................................................82

v

Abstract

A 2002 cover story for the San Francisco Bay Guardian codified a group of local artists
that included Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, and Chris Johanson into a Bay Area art
movement inextricably tethered to the neighborhood in which they lived, worked, and
cultivated their artistic practices. While the Mission was being hit by a tidal wave of
redevelopment and gentrification as a result of the city’s dot-com boom, Mission School
artists and other cultural producers in the neighborhood were initiating and participating
in a succession of grassroots, alternative exhibition spaces, publications, acts of creative
resistance, and community-making endeavors aimed at cultivating a culture based on an
ethos of resourcefulness, collectivity, and self-support. This thesis will trace the
constellation of key sites of production and exhibition through which the Mission School
artists moved during the turbulent 1990s in order to bring into focus the cultural
landscape of the neighborhood and community that functioned as a “signal of aesthetic
value” not only for Mission School artists, but for the plurality of artists who were living
and working in the Mission.
1

Introduction

On April 10, 2002 the free alternative newspaper the San Francisco Bay Guardian hit the
streets bearing a polychromatic cover bearing the headline, “the Mission School: A new
group of San Francisco artists is delivering its neighborhood to the art world.” (fig. 1)
The bold, yellow announcement is stamped atop a flat, brightly colored street scene
comprised of irregular, multi-storied buildings, cartoony cars, and rudimentarily rendered
urban dwellers scuttling to and fro. A varnish of frenetic, handwritten text veils the faux-
naïve cityscape, punctuated by speech balloons that struggle to contain the verbal
ramblings of their owners. Perched in the top right-hand corner, one oversized speech
balloon’s syntactically challenged utterance overflows onto the newspapers title; “I think
that San Francisco is a vibrant, beautiful, sometimes smelly, multi-dimensional-cultural
city with lots of community, ” effuses the speaker, “for example since I moved here in
’89 I have met so many creative people and heard so much history…” The remainder of
the monologue is illegible, seeping into the latticework of words and phrases clouding the
page.
The image’s creator is Chris Johanson, a skateboarding, graffiti writing, self-
taught artist and punk musician who moved to San Francisco’s Mission district from the
suburbs of San Jose, California in 1989. Chris Johanson has since been identified—along
with Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Rigo 23, Alicia McCarthy, Ruby Neri, Scott
Hewicker, Aaron Noble, and others of their of “refreshingly scrappy, modest,
hardworking, and community oriented” ilk—as a progenitor of the Mission School, the
2

geographically-bound art movement that formally took its place in the grand narrative of
art history with the publishing of Glen Helfand’s cover story.
1

To those foreign to or unfamiliar with the Mission—an area south of downtown
roughly delineated by the US 101 freeway on the East, Church Street on the West, Cesar
Chavez Street on the South, and Duboce Avenue on the North
2
—the text that
haphazardly fills this composition reads as cipher—arbitrary, coded references to people
and places detached from meaning or significance. But to Chris Johanson, who describes
his early work “as documentary picture making,”
3
these words mine the cultural
stratigraphy of a neighborhood critical to the development of his artistic practice, and
those of his Mission School peers. Julie Deamer, director of the alternative gallery Four
Walls who worked with Johanson early in his career, recalls:
[Chris Johanson's] work would appear in unexpected places—bathroom walls,
sidewalks, music flyers—as well as in cafes, bookstores, and neighborhood
galleries. At the time, much of Johanson's work portrayed and reflected the
neighborhood itself, offering an honest account of the positive and negative
aspects of life around him. Johanson's local presence was strong.
4

1
Helfand, Glen. "The Mission School: San Francisco’s Street Artists Deliver Their Neighborhood to the
Art World." San Francisco Bay Guardian, April 18, 2002. Accessed February 19, 2012.
http://www.sfbg.com/36/28/art_mission_school.html.

2
It should be noted that within the Mission there are discrete border distinctions—what can best be
described as sub-neighborhoods—within the larger district that include the Inner Mission, Outer Mission,
and Mission Dolores. For the purposes of this text, “Mission” will refer to the Inner Mission, as centered
around the 16
th
and Mission intersection.

3
Lara Allen, "Chris Johanson, 2009: Interview by Lara Allen," Index Magazine, August 2009, accessed
September 11, 2011, http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/chris_johanson.shtml.

4
Deamer, Julie. "Mission Men." a-n Magazine, June 2004.

3

San Francisco Chronicle art critic Thomas Albright once wrote that the burden is on the
artist “to create work that has some authentic roots in his own experience, and therefore
can connect on some level with the experiences of others.”
5
Throughout the 1990s and
into the early 2000s, Johanson and his Mission School cohort—as if answering Albright’s
charge—produced deeply observational artworks that stemmed from their immediate
relationship to their neighborhood—the people living there, the physical spaces
comprising it, and to each other. Expressing a range of disciplines, styles, and conceptual
impulses, the Mission School artists worked collaboratively as much as independently,
coalescing with other local artists, poets, musicians, and filmmakers in an effort to
preserve and contribute to the cultural heritage of their neighborhood—a heritage
fortified by an ethos of social mobilization and neighborhood preservation—during the
tempestuous moment of San Francisco’s late-1990s dot-com boom.
The Mission School artists and the art works they produced throughout the 1990s
have alternatively been labeled as “urban rustic,” “digital bohemian,” and “New Folk.”
6

Epithets such as these speak to the aesthetic and methodological tendencies shared by a
faction of artists whose works are alloys of surf, skate, and bike culture, environmental
and social awareness, strong convictions and do-it-yourself (DIY) rigor. However, such
terms neglect to sufficiently illuminate the multifarious cultural context out of which

5
Thomas Albright, "A Lament for the Lost Fan," in On Art and Artists: Essays by Thomas Albright, ed.
Beverly Hennessey (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1989), 13.

6
“Urban rustic” and “digital bohemian” were used by curator Renny Pritikin in his introduction to Amy
Franceschini ‘s Harvest: Futurefarmers, 1995-2002; curator Eungie Joo used “New Folk” to describe the
work of the Mission School artists in her May/June 2002 Flash Art article, "The New Folk: Stories From
the Backyard."

4

these modalities developed.
7
The limitations of the critical nomenclature applied to his
work has prompted Chris Johanson to openly begrudge the newly-minted Mission School
moniker for its innate failure to accurately represent “the situation” in the Mission
between during the nineties—a scene described by Johanson as “a lot of politically left
people working within all mediums. Painters, filmmakers, poets, people.”
8
Despite
understanding Helfand’s critical impulse to write an article about what he saw as a
“particular style of painting” coming out of the Mission during this time, Johanson has
conceded that he didn’t “hang out” with core Mission School members Margaret
Kilgallen and Barry McGee so much as share the same spaces with them, instead
identifying individuals such as Scott Hewicker, Cliff Hengst, Bambi Lake, Scott
Williams, and Christopher Garret as influential members of his community.
9

Aaron Noble, sharing Johanson’s misgivings with the Mission School
designation, explains,

7
For the purposes of this text the term “Mission School” will be deployed when referencing the core group
of artists highlighted by art critic Glen Helfand in his 2002 San Francisco Bay Guardian cover story—
Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Chris Johanson and those with “related aesthetics”: Alicia McCarthy,
Rigo 23, and Aaron Noble. Deploying this term, however, is done in recognition of the fact that those who
have been anointed with this designation recurrently dismiss it.

8
In an interview for The Blackmail Chris Johanson was asked if he felt the term “Mission School” was a
relevant description for what was happening there, or if it was a term coined for the convenience of the
media. He replied: “Writing for different magazines and papers, philosophy in general was discussed a lot.
No people were working in advertising at all. That was not connected to anything at all, to anyone. We
were freaks. The Mission School thing does not describe the situation at all. The scene in the Mission
District was a lot of politically left people working within all mediums. Painters, filmmakers, poets,
people.” Johanson, Chris. "The Lens of My Brain." Interview by Tristan Ceddia. The Blackmail, August
2011. Accessed February 19, 2012. http://www.theblackmail.com.au/issue/art/the-lens-of-my-brain/.

9
Chris Johanson and Johanna Jackson, "Bad at Sports Episode 315: Johanson and Jackson," interview by
Duncan MacKenzie, Bad at Sports, September 13, 2011, accessed February 22, 2012,
http://badatsports.com/2011/episode-315/.

5

The problem was that if you included all of the artists who seem to be involved
and respected, you found yourself with an unnameable diversity, but if you
winnowed it down to a core of aesthetically related artists, then you severed the
community from a group of artists for whom community itself is a signal
aesthetic value.
10

Noble’s point is a vital one. To extract a select number of artists from their community in
order to champion a canon of regional artistic production not only discounts the unique
socio-political conditions in which each individual practice was cultivated and its
nuanced conceptual and ideological underpinnings, but the diversity of works being
produced by the myriad of cultural producers who all called the Mission home.
The Mission’s cultural history is one in which art making and socio-political
activism have been inextricably twined, infusing the art works and methodologies of
artists who have chosen to live and work in the neighborhood throughout the decades.
During the 1990s cultural producers in the Mission—in much the same way as their
predecessors—initiated and participated in a succession of grassroots, alternative
exhibition spaces, publications, and community-making endeavors as a means of creating
a culture based on collectivity and self-support. This thesis will trace a constellation of
key sites of production and exhibition through which the Mission School artists moved
during the 1990s so as to better bring into focus the neighborhood and community that
functioned as a “signal of aesthetic value” not only for Mission School artists, but for the
“unnameable diversity” of artists living and working in the Mission.

10
Aaron Noble, "The So-Called Mission School," in Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo, by
Annice Jacoby (New York: Abrams, 2009), 85.
6

Chapter 1: The Streets of the Mission: Where Art and Activism Meet

Why do people come here?
Are we seduced by the promise of bohemia
in a country of restricted imagination?
In an era of constrained freedoms?
Are we part of the ongoing wave of international exiles
escaping failed revolutions and civil wars?
Or the wave of sexual and artistic misfits escaping
orthodoxy in our homelands?
11

San Francisco’s profuse history of bohemian counterculturalism stems from its province
as a metropolis for transplants and transients, host to an ongoing succession of artists,
writers, musicians, visionaries, and utopian dreamers driven to the “city by the bay” by
an unrelenting desire to escape “the center,” the mainstream, and the conventional.
Perhaps the strongest countercultural undercurrent in the city is that of creative
resistance, exemplified in the 1950s and 1960s by the writers, artists, and musicians of
the Beat Generation and their fervent desire to craft expressions of authentic personal
experience able to bring private life and personal politics into the foreground of public
discourse.
12
Spurning orthodoxy, the Beats developed aesthetic sensibilities, subject

11
Guillermo Gómez Peña, “Backdrop for a New Bohemia,” Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo,
45. New York: Abrams, 2009. An excerpt from “Backdrop for a New Bohemia,” a poem written by
performance artist, and long time Mission resident, Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

12
Steven Watson’s book The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944-1960
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1995) and Nancy J. Peters’s essay “The Beat Generation and San Francisco's
Culture of Dissent,” in Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture: A City Lights Anthology, ed.
James Brook, Chris Carlsson, and Nancy J. Peters (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1998) provide a
comprehensive look at the Beat generation in San Francisco and its heritage of creative resistance.

7

matter, and personal interests that were distinctly individual, and defied mainstream
appropriation.
13

A predominantly Latino neighborhood since the 1940s, Latino writers and artists
made the Mission their homestead; its cohesiveness of community further incited their
desire to explore both group and self-identity.
14
Community-based activist groups
proliferated the neighborhood throughout the 1960s and 1970s, organizing in response to
city-initiated redevelopment plans for the neighborhood and dissatisfaction with living
conditions in the Mission. The Mission became the heart of Latino culture and politics in
San Francisco, with social mobilization and creative resistance in the face of political or
economic adversity its defining characteristic. The sense of identity imbued on the
geographic space of the Mission, and the convergence of culture and politics that
occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, was the a result of the cultural identity that the
neighborhood’s Latino artists, writers, radicals, and intellectuals worked hard to cultivate:
La Mission wasn’t one individual, but a community, an unofficial group of
artists who interacted, exchanged ideas, and helped each other in our projects.
. . . In 1971, nothing beautiful had happened to Latinos in the United States, so
we set out with our art to remake the world a beautiful place ourselves. We
didn’t ask anyone’s permission to do it. Not knowing any better, we went out
and did it.
15

13
Nancy J. Peters, “The Beat Generation and San Francisco's Culture of Dissent,” in Reclaiming San
Francisco: History, Politics, Culture: A City Lights Anthology, ed. James Brook, Chris Carlsson, and
Nancy J. Peters (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1998), 212.

14
Ibid., 214.

15
Alejandro Murguía, The Medicine of Memory: A Mexica Clan in California (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2002), 118.

8

One of the more vital intersections of art and politics in the Mission was the community
mural movement that dawned in the 1960s—a movement whose legacy in the
neighborhood visibly persists to this contemporary moment. The early phases of the
movement took many of its political and aesthetic cues from the New Deal and Works
Progress Administration (WPA) mural painting of the 1930s, a social realist style most
famously brought to San Francisco by Diego Rivera in 1931 when he was commissioned
to paint murals at the California College for the Arts and the City Club of the San
Francisco Stock exchange.
16
Thirty years later, community muralists sought to move
away from New Deal mural paradigms that celebrated traditional American values of
democracy and private enterprise—values that New Dealers were seeking to preserve—
through images that accordingly emphasized that work, rather than political action, would
illicit a return to prosperity.
17
As shifts in funding sources, forms of project
administration, and political engagement began to shape the new community mural

16
Diego Rivera with Gladys March, My Art, My Life: An Autobiography (New York: Dover Publ., 1991).
Writing in My Art. My Life: An Autobiography, Rivera recounts that in 1926 he received a commission
from William Gerstle, president of the San Francisco Art Commission, to paint a wall in the California
School of Fine Arts, and later secured a second commission at the San Francisco Stock Exchange (SFSE)
with the help of sculptor Ralph Stackpole, who was decorating the SFSE along with other artists under the
supervision of its architect, Timothy Pflueger. When Rivera ran into trouble trying to obtain his visa
because of his political affiliations, Albert Bender, a prominent San Francisco art patron and collector, was
instrumental in helping him finally obtain it. Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo arrived in San Francisco in
November 1930. For a detailed account of Rivera’s commissions in San Francisco, and the politics
surrounding them, see Anthony W. Lee’s Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San
Francisco's Public Murals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

17
Steven M. Gelber, “Working to Prosperity: California's New Deal Murals.” California History Magazine
58, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 58-98.

9

movement in the 1960s, artists began to focus more intently on themes of social injustice
and oppression in their work.
18

In his essay “Street Subversion: The Political Geography of Murals and Graffiti,”
Timothy W. Drescher points out that early community muralists in San Francisco saw
their work as part of a larger political struggle with the potential to affect the way society
was organized so that it could meet the needs all of its constituents, not just those in its
upper echelons. This was a goal that, as Drescher explains, manifested itself in the
movement methodologically, aesthetically, and programmatically.
19
Stylistically, the
majority of murals produced in the Mission and other San Francisco neighborhoods
during the 1960s tapped into the social realism and left-leaning politics of the 1930s,
exercising the mutually held belief that an unimpeded and consistent communication of
subject matter was the chief function of the mural. However, in addition to the mural’s
didactic function, subject matter could range from commentary, dissent, and antagonism
to the patent commemoration of the disenfranchised. “In the sixties the mere assertion of
a nondominant culture, the expression of marginalized voices,” Drescher elucidates,
“functioned as a challenge to the dominant myth of a coherent, centralized, white U.S.
culture.”
20

With hand-painted murals quietly occupying the walls of local bars, restaurants,
cafes, and theaters, the Mission District was primed for a burgeoning community mural

18
Timothy W. Drescher, “Street Subversion: The Political Geography of Murals and Graffiti,” in
Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture (A City Lights Anthology), ed. James Brook, Chris
Carlsson, and Nancy J. Peters (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1998), 231.

19
Ibid., 233.

20
Ibid., 234.
10

movement. Residents citywide already had a strong familiarity with the murals that were
created during the WPA, and Diego Rivera’s legacy in the city persisted in the form of
murals gracing the walls of the San Francisco Art Institute and the San Francisco City
College, infusing the everyday lives of young, eager students and seasoned city-dwellers
alike. What’s more, the Mission District was largely populated with immigrants from
Mexico, where public murals were both pervasive, and as highly revered as those who
painted them. This, in addition to San Francisco’s extensive history of nurturing activism
in social, cultural, and political arenas, made the Mission the ideal enclave for the rise of
Muralismo.
21

The milieu out of which the Mission’s mural movement evolved was one of
extremely active, radical political movements that included the Black Panthers, Brown
Berets, Red Guard, and American Indian Movement. Spurred by this political ardency,
Mexican Americans began to agitate for their own social and political change, spawning
diverse activities and agendas that fostered the emergence of Chicanismo. Evolving as
both a political consciousness and cultural movement, Chicanismo marked a
transformation in Mexican American self-reflexivity that allowed Mexican Americans to
view themselves as members of a community with a shared a past, present, and future—a
community with the power to coalesce and demand political empowerment, education,

21
Annice Jacoby, “With and Without Permission: Mission Muralismo,” in Street Art San Francisco:
Mission Muralismo (New York: Abrams, 2009), 29. Muralismo, as described in Street Art San Francisco:
Mission Muralismo, is a chaotic art movement, and American twenty-first-century mix of style, content,
and multiculturalism, the individual and collective efforts of which challenge boundaries of ownership,
space, and social agency.

11

and visibility.
22
Chicanismo undergirded many of the Mission muralists’ methodological
and conceptual approaches, becoming a central tenant of the community mural moment,
and visually manifesting in many of the murals painted during the movement’s
culmination. Muralist Ester Hernandes explains,
We didn’t control media—not newspapers, not television, not radio stations.
Murals and screenprinting were our way of getting out our ideas, visions, and
concerns in public spaces at low cost. We were inspired by Chicanismo’s
emphasis on collective work and by Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco,
who demonstrated how artists could be of public service, both beautifying and
informing their communities.
23

Despite being firmly rooted in Chicanismo, Mission Muralismo remained detached from
any single philosophy or platform, developing organically while remaining in constant
conversation with the various social, political, and cultural organizing that was occurring
both in the city and across the Bay Area during the early seventies. Grappling with issues
of public representation, responsibility to the neighborhood, aesthetics, and individual
motivations and artistic visions was an ongoing challenge for this phalanx of Mission
muralists; however, it was the audience and its collective voice that would ultimately take
precedence.
24
Anchored by nonprofit art organizations Precita Eyes and Galería de la
Raza—community spaces that for all intents and purposes served as nerve centers for the

22
Jaime Cortez, “Beauty Is a Verb: Mission Muralismo 1971-1982,” in Street Art San Francisco: Mission
Muralismo, by Annice Jacoby (New York: Abrams, 2009), 61.

23
As quoted in Jaime Cortez, “Beauty Is a Verb: Mission Muralismo 1971-1982,” 61.

24
Patricia Rodriguez, founding member of the female mural collective Las Mujeres Muralistas, confirms,
“We are forever placing audience first in our work as muralists.” Quoted in Jaime Cortez, "Beauty Is a
Verb: Mission Muralismo 1971-1982," in Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo, by Annice Jacoby
(New York: Abrams, 2009), 65.

12

movement—murals were engaged as public forums for addressing immediate and
longstanding issues.
25

By the early 1990s, Mission School artists were intensively tapping into, and
continuing, the energy of the street and the Mission’s rich legacy of Muralismo, making
their marks on walls in and beyond the Mission, both with permission, and without. In
1992, Aaron Noble and Rigo 23—who met at the nearby artist-run, experimental film and
video space Artists Television Access, and both maintained studios at 47 Clarion—
founded the Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP) together with handful of volunteers
who lived in close proximity to the alley. Clarion Alley was a forgotten swath of street
running parallel to 17th and 18th Streets that channeled a despairing procession of heroin
junkies, drug dealers, prostitutes, and homeless war veterans between “the crack market”
on Mission Street and the “cop shop” on Valencia Street.
26
The impetus, consequently,
for starting a mural project there was a desire to convert the derelict alley from “a path
avoided, to a path traversed,” transmuting it into a public art corridor founded on
principles of social inclusiveness and aesthetic variety.
27

25
Precita Eyes and Galeriá de la Raza are two of the Mission’s longest running cultural institutions. Precita
Eyes Muralists Association was founded in 1977 by muralists Susan and Luis Cervantes as a nonprofit
organization responsible not only for maintaining the neighborhood’s existing murals, but to ensure the
continued efforts of artists in creating new outdoor works throughout the city. Galeriá de la Raza was
founded in 1970 as a nonprofit community-based arts organization whose mission was to foster public
awareness and appreciation of Chicano/Latino art, and serve as a laboratory through which artists could
both explore contemporary issues in art, culture and civic society, and advance intercultural dialogue.

26
Aaron Noble, “The Clarion Alley Mural Project,” in Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo, ed.
Annice Jacoby (New York: Abrams, 2009), 113.

27
Siobhan Fleming, “Walls with Tongues: Muralist RIGO 02 Speaks.” Comet Magazine, November 2001.
Accessed February 19, 2012. http://cometmagazine.org/cometsite4/cometsite3/rigo.html.

13

The seven members of CAMP coordinated efforts to open a bank account for the
organization, initiate a letter campaign to neighborhood landlords, organize benefits,
canvas local businesses, and write grants, all the while looking to Balmy Alley—the
cynosure of Mission Muralismo located several blocks away off of 24
th
Street—as the
archetype for the project they were conceiving.
28
Local artists participated in CAMP as if
it was a rite of passage, including virtually all of the artists affiliated with the Mission
School. Working under the street moniker “Twist” that he adopted in 1985, Barry
McGee’s contribution to the project came within the first year of CAMP’s inception.
29

After receiving his BFA in painting and printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute
in 1991, McGee was steadily building a cult status in San Francisco’s graffiti
underground, his visceral originality and masterful spraycan control evidenced in the
comic-inspired menagerie of ductile screws, handguns, syringes, books, bumblebees, and
cartoony, long-faced misanthropes he painted on one of Clarion’s many corroded steel
garage doors. McGee’s piece for Clarion Alley (fig. 2) was emblematic of his developing
practice for which graffiti formed the intellectual crux, functioning as both a

28
Balmy Alley has a concentration of more than thirty vibrant murals painted on fences, building walls,
and garage doors. The first murals to anoint Balmy Alley date back to1972, and were the work of the two-
woman team of Patricia Rodriquez and Graciela Carillo, known as Las Mujeres Muralistas.

In 1984, Ray
Patlan spearheaded a project in the alley that was centered on the common theme celebrating indigenous
Central American cultures and protesting United States intervention in Central America; Patlans project
culminated in the addition of twenty-seven murals to the alley during the summer of 1985.

29
McGee also used the handles “Twisto” and “Twister” when working clandestinely in the streets.

14

communicative record of his observations of urban society, and an extension of a desire
for the kind of artistic sovereignty that only working in the streets could offer.
30

Rather than painting directly on a wall or garage door, Chris Johanson’s
contribution to Clarion Alley was instead painted on a repurposed piece of scrap wood
that was then nailed to a fence that flanked the alley. The weather-beaten 2 x 5 foot
canvas was daubed in a patchwork of muted, pastel housepaint, atop of which a street
scene populated by dispossessed urbanites drifting along sidewalks, driving cars, and
staring out of apartment windows is drawn in black paint (fig. 3). Speech balloons are
precariously suspended above one set of gauche passersby, capturing their sidewalk
exchange in front of “NICE STORE”—a fictional mercantile where everything is 75% to
100% off, the food is cheap or free (and so are the clothes), and where you are able to
talk about any and all issues you may have (fig. 4). “I am going to Adobe to hang out,”
says the one, referring to the real-life bookstore located less than 2 blocks away on 16
th

Street that is a well-loved social hub for a miscellany of neighborhood dwellers. “I’ll see
you there,” the other replies.
Johanson’s unassuming tableau in Clarion Alley functioned as much as a mirror
as it did a painting, reflecting the neighborhood-cum-gallery that was its home back onto
itself. An oblique aerial snapshot of discord and solace, Johanson’s portrait of his
neighborhood read at once deeply observational and distracted, bringing a sweet, self-

30
In an interview on San Francisco’s early 1990s graffiti scene for street art and culture magazine Juxtapoz,
Craig “KR” Costello recalls, “They were all smart, educated artists. It wasn’t hood and street at all. It was
young artists who saw painting in the streets as free, fun, and adventurous . . . Twist influenced so many
people to go out and paint, non-graffiti writers and art school kids.” Craig Costello, “Craig Costello,”
interview by Austin McManus, Juxtapoz, August 2011, 36-37.

15

aware folkiness in collision with the gritty, unedited aesthetic of the street. Johanson’s
intimate familiarity with the streets of the Mission was augmented through his daily
skateboarding excursions through them, and his illicit markings of them.
Negatron, Chris Johanson’s balding, sharp-nosed—frequently prostrate—
curmudgeon appeared “like arrows from a blind archer,” hastily drawn by black marker
in desolate alleys, on lampposts, bathroom walls (fig. 5), and the sides of delivery trucks
(fig. 6) alongside the respective tags and pictograms of many Mission School artists.
31
In
actuality, these quick, vernacular expressions were not so much motivated by a desire to
deface property, as they were by the intention for them to function as an innately
discursive act—an encrypted form of communication visible to everyone, but
decipherable only to those who knew how to read it.
32
Aaron Noble elucidates,
I was struck by graffiti’s hermetic panache, its secret language, and its
abandonment of the architectural frame; the way certain throw-ups seemed to
float free on the wall, making no claim on it, in marked contrast to the
traditional murals which employed an accessible visual vocabulary and treated
the wall as a picture plane to be filled up. Unwilling to abandon the painterly
ambition of older muralists like Chuy Campusano, Dewey Crumpler, and Ray
Patlan, however, I sought a mode which would combine interesting aspects of
both.
33

CAMP co-founder Rigo 23, influenced by “the intense level of civic participation during
the late eighties and early nineties, the tactics of ACT-UP and other culture jammers, the

31
Aaron Noble, “The Clarion Alley Mural Project,” in Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo, ed.
Annice Jacoby (New York: Abrams, 2009), 116. Aaron Noble describes the street-painting tendency of the
1990s as a “devolution into text,” demonstrated in the pictographic tags of McGee's screws, Dave Arnn’s
dogs, and Ruby Neri’s horses: “If tagging is the individuals reply to the proliferation of corporate logo,”
explains Noble, “these artists had begun to carry out whole marketing campaigns.”

32
Hammer Museum, Barry McGee (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2000), accessed February 22, 2012,
http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/detail/exhibition_id/24.

33
Aaron Noble, “A Short History of Aaron Noble.” Booklyn Artists Alliance, accessed February 23, 2012.
http://www.booklyn.org/artists/Aaron%20Noble,%20Los%20Angeles,%20CA.php.
16

strong presence of Latin American organizing, the punks on bikes, and the cultural
diversity” in the Bay Area, was cultivating a public street art practice directed towards
social and political engagement.
34
The murals that resulted endeavored to enlighten the
viewing public of issues germane but oft overlooked—from the plight of political
prisoners, to issues of cultural authenticity.
Deliberately deploying straightforward, uncomplicated text with bold, graphic
simplicity, murals such as Innercity Home (1995, fig. 7) brought aspects of city life
directly to the attention of the everyday urban dweller. Innercity Home (1995) was the
first in a series of road sign inspired murals created by Rigo 23 for San Francisco's semi-
industrial South of Market neighborhood bordering the “multimedia gulch”—ground zero
for the impending high tech boom. Located on 6
th
and Howard Streets, Rigo 23’s
monumental red, white, and blue mural parodied the shield-shaped sign for Interstate 80,
the freeway from which it was visible to thousands of commuters returning to the city
from their high-tech jobs in Silicon Valley, or leaving the city for the comforts of
suburbia. The enormous “HOME” in the center of the sign was the result of a series of
meetings between Rigo 23 and the low-income apartment building’s residents, allowing
for the collaborative conceptualization of a phrase that both identified the building, and
expressed their pride in their new home.

34
Rigo 23, “5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice) with Rigo 23,” interview by Thom Donovan, Art 21
(web log), January 20, 2011, accessed February 23, 2012, http://blog.art21.org/2011/01/20/5-questions-for-
contemporary-practice-with-rigo-23/.

17

Rigo 23 viewed his individual work, and that produced by his friends who were
practicing more subversive forms of street art, as part of the same oeuvre—functioning as
visual expressions of cultural identity, and exercises in creative resistance:
35

I collaborate with individuals and communities in resistance through art, but
they collaborate with me through their own practices. What results, therefore,
can’t be measured only through visual or aesthetic lenses. Together, we nurture
relationships that need strengthening. Each brings their own context and
expertise, their personal and collective history, their regrets and aspirations. A
work of art results, sure; but so does a network of social relations, a set of shared
experiences, and a community of concerns and possibilities.
36

In this way, Clarion Alley served as a forum for a wide range of artists who were working
in “resistance through art” to coalesce, nurture their relationships, and engage in dialogue
with one another—dialogue that would oftentimes lead to fruitful collaborations with
community and art organizations.
37
This convergence was perhaps best exemplified by
the 1996 Redstone Labor Temple Mural Project, an undertaking led by Aaron Noble in
collaboration with Mission-based nonprofit arts organization The Lab and residents of the
Red Stone Building that brought together artists who were working in a more
straightforward muralist tradition like Carolyn Castaño and Susan Green, with artists

35
Maria João Veloso, “Rigo 23, San Francisco.” Up Magazine, December 1, 2011, accessed February 23,
2012, http://upmagazine-tap.com/en/pt_artigos/rigo-23-san-francisco/.

36
Rigo 23, “5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice) with Rigo 23,” interview by Thom Donovan, Art 21
(web log), January 20, 2011, accessed February 23, 2012, http://blog.art21.org/2011/01/20/5-questions-for-
contemporary-practice-with-rigo-23/.

37
Alicia McCarthy, Aaron Noble, and Chris Johanson have all collaborated on projects with Creativity
Explored (CE), a Mission-based nonprofit visual arts center for artists with developmental disabilities.
Alicia McCarthy worked with CE artists on murals for the neighborhood co-op Rainbow Grocery, while
Chris Johanson teamed up with Harrell Fletcher and CE artist David Jarvey to produce Forbidden Zone
(2000), a video and installation at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts addressing Jarvey’s interest in an
early Star Trek episode. Creativity Explored has an extensive history of collective projects with a long list
of established local artists, and continues to facilitate these fruitful collaborations to this day.
18

exercising a more hybridized, street-style form of muralism like Barry McGee, Ruby
Neri, Rigo 23, Isis Rodriguez, and Scott Williams.
Located on 16
th
Street between Mission Street and South Van Ness, the Red Stone
building was originally built as a “Labor Temple” by unions in 1914, serving as labor
movement headquarters for over five decades. The building would accommodate many
uses in its lifetime, housing government unemployment offices, a Filipino dance hall, and
eventually an array of nonprofit arts, social service, and environmental organizations.
Having recently relocated to the Redstone building, The Lab—an interdisciplinary artists’
organization with a mission of supporting the development and presentation of new
visual, performance, and literary art—was interested in facilitating a project that would
not only highlight the building’s rich history, but strengthen a sense of community among
its many tenants.
The Redstone Building mural project started with extensive research into the
history of the site, and outreach to tenants, neighbors, and constituents in the form of a
collective design process that incorporated community input. Representative of the
diverse styles of their makers, the murals that resulted—executed by a single artist or
small team of artists—addressed the shared vision and themes that percolated from the
community design process. “I envisioned a series of closely related panels with the artists
working collaboratively on each,” remembers Noble, “As it turned out there was some
collaboration in the design process but beyond that each artist assumed full responsibility
19

for an individual mural.”
38
While six of the Red Stone Building murals specifically
tapped into the history of the site, depicting the activities of the labor unions that
occupied the building between 1914 and 1966, the remaining six murals reflected the
building’s later uses. Mission School contributions to the project included: Ruby Neri and
Alicia McCarthy’s oblique tribute to the Sign Painters’ Local 510, Barry McGee's
delicate rendering of immigrants floating to a new land, and Rigo 23's 3/4 Water,
celebrating the environmental organizations in the building.
39

38
Creative Work Fund, “Creative Work Fund Lead Artists: Aaron Noble,” Creative Work Fund, accessed
February 23, 2012, http://www.creativeworkfund.org/modern/bios/aaron_noble.html.

39
At the height of the dot-com boom, both the Redstone Building and Clarion Alley would become focal
points in the fight against neighborhood gentrification. In 1999, when dot-com speculators started
eyeballing their building for development, the tenants of the Redstone organized and formed the Redstone
Tenants Association (RTA) to protect themselves from the rising rents and evictions they witnessed
elsewhere in the neighborhood. With the help of the Mission Economic Development Association
(MEDA), the tenants campaigned for the building’s historic landmark designation and won, granting them
the security they had hoped for. At the same time, the property at 47 Clarion—CAMP’s headquarters—was
purchased by developers and slated for demolition prompting a series of actions and protests in response.
This will be discussed in greater detail in a later section.

20

Chapter 2: Do-It-Yourself: Books, Zines, and Punk in the Mission

The nineties presented San Francisco’s oppositional culture, and the artists that were part
of it, with a slew of challenges brought on by an ever-growing global economy that was
transforming the way people worked and the dynamics of urban life, expediting upscale
development and real estate speculation, and driving up rents. As historian Nancy J.
Peters explains, older channels of social contention were eliminated in the nineties as a
result of the “commodification of transgression” and the instantaneous appropriation and
marketing of dissent by larger, corporate powers.
40

The Beat era, like the nineties, was a period characterized by “paradigmatic
technological and economic change, government capitulation to corporate power, the rise
of religious fundamentalism, and a media-imposed anti-intellectual culture.”
41
In much
the same way as the countercultural literature, publishing, and underground comix
movement developed in the Mission in response to the socio-political changes that were
occurring forty years prior, the Mission School artists responded by engaging in the
production and circulation of DIY publications that attempted to subvert the mainstream
appropriation and exploitation of their artistic work. Consequently, artists would
habitually gather in spaces that facilitated the kind of exchange that was necessary to
sustain these independent distribution networks.

40
Peters, “The Beat Generation and San Francisco’s Culture of Dissent,” 214.

41
Ibid.

21

Since opening in 1989, Adobe Books has been a bastion of bohemianism in the
Mission—“a charmingly disheveled refuge from the static electricity generated by the
sidewalk traffic–tech-industry casualties, drug addicts, geniuses, wanna-be DJs, artists,
homeless people, transsexuals, and lucid New Age types, all of whom face the cultural
dilemmas of corporate greed and the basic, universal human struggle to be happy.”
42
For
Johanson—whose studio at 15
th
and Shotwell Streets was within walking distance of the
shop—Adobe functioned as an invaluable nexus for interplay and exchange.
43
In a
segment for KQED’s art show “Spark,” Chris Johanson is shown walking down 16
th

Street and into Adobe Books, where the store’s owner Andrew McKinley greets him with
warm enthusiasm. “This is one of the most important places in the world for me,”
Johanson’s voiceover explains. “This is basically my home. A lot of people have met
here and become friends.”
44

In 2000, under the charge of artist Amanda Eicher, Adobe opened up an
endearingly ramshackle backroom gallery with the physical and material assistance of
Chris Johanson and Christopher Garrett. A succession of local artists, including Johanson

42
Helfand, "The Mission School: San Francisco’s Street Artists Deliver Their Neighborhood to the Art
World."

43
The interplay and exchange that occurred between artists at Adobe Books echoes that which occurred at
Gary Arlington’s San Francisco Comic Company on 23
rd
Street during the Mission’s underground comix
movement in the 1970s. The San Francisco Comic Company became a polestar for cartoonists like R.
Crumb, Ron Turner, and Rick Griffin who would breeze into the shop whenever they needed a break from
the drawing board, generating a benevolent sense of competition that was further encouraged by the fact
that—at the peak of the movement between 1972 and 1973—the Mission was saturated with artists who
lived within walking distance of one another.

44
Owner Andrew McKinley is one of the neighborhood’s most beloved figures and a long-time patron of
the arts. He is sympathetic to the plight of each struggling artist who has stumbled into his store and,
whenever possible, has offered a job behind the register to whomever needed the help making ends meet. A
string of Mission artists has worked at Adobe at one time or another, including Johanna “Jo” Jackson, who
married Chris Johanson in 2003.

22

and Alicia McCarthy, mounted solo shows in the drafty, intimate space while the
bookstore played host to experimental performances, poetry readings, and offbeat local
bands like the Quails. Unfortunately, little documentation of the gallery’s early years
exists—Eicher admits, and bemoans, that documenting the shows in the Adobe
Backroom Gallery was her “Achilles’ heel”—her “real” interest lying instead with the
people flowing in and out of the space, the connections that were being made, and the
networks that expanded outward.
45

In addition to supporting the many independent bookstores, publishers, and
printing presses in the neighborhood, several of the Mission School artists participated in
independent publishing ventures of their own. With jobs as a librarian, bookbinder, and
conservator at the San Francisco Public Library, Margaret Kilgallen was entrenched in
book culture and the literary arts, her encyclopedic knowledge of printmaking and
letterpress techniques and styles consequently permeating her aesthetic and methodology.
Kilgallen self-published the hand-bound, hand-illustrated book Nellie was There (1998)
and pocket-sized zine Fly by Night (1998), and her many works in gouache and acrylic
were painted directly on the discarded pages of books that were undergoing conservation.
Her interest in typefaces, letterform, and printmaking suffused virtually everything she
produced, as she indicates in a PBS documentary profiling her and husband Barry
McGee:
Having a background in doing printmaking and letterpress, I think that I became
very interested in images that were flat and graphic. And my painting today is
still very flat…American craft is like that too—the painting is very flat. And

45
Eicher, Amanda. Interview by author. November 5, 2011.

23

also the painting that you see on the storefronts, handmade signs, tend to be very
flat. That’s probably my biggest influence.
46

Chris Johanson began what would become an extended foray into independent media
with the self-published xerox books Bills Liquors and You in 1997. At the same time, his
close friends Scott Hewicker and Cliff Hengst collaborated on Mission Men, a small-run
zine series paying homage to their neighborhood’s blue-collar workers with titles Mission
Cops, Mission Mechanics, and Irish Movers (fig. 8) Prompted by a shared penchant for
“freaky” and off kilter pictures that they didn’t have room to explore in their individual
practices, Hewicker and Hengst culled images from gay pornography magazines and
miscellaneous, found periodicals, and combined them into cerebral, tripped-out
bricolages (fig. 9). The collages were interspersed between drawings, cartoons, and
handwritten text, and compiled into xeroxed, hand-assembled booklets that sold for $1 at
openings for local gallery scene/escena, or were simply given away for free. Hewicker
and Hengst’s zines offered a unique glimpse into the psyches of their creators, and the
observations of a neighborhood and art scene they simultaneously loved and hated.
A treasured neighborhood gallery space, scene/escena was opened by artists Jim
Schatz and Darin Klein in November of 1996—a time when “radical, left-wing,
intellectual, queer, sex positive, renegade individuals [ruled] the streets, the clubs, the
arts, and the literary scene.”
47
Klein and Schatz started the gallery in the unfinished,
ground-floor storage space of Schatz’s carriage house apartment at 44 San Carlos Street

46
“Art21: ‘Place’ with Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen,” in Art in the Twenty-First Century, PBS,
September 2001, accessed February 24, 2012, http://www.art21.org/videos/segment-barry-mcgee-margaret-
kilgallen-in-place

47
Klein, Darin. E-mail interview by author. November 27, 2011.
24

with the goal of creating a forum in which to show their own new bodies of work.
However, it didn’t take long for all of their artist friends to come around and ask for their
own shows in the raw, newly-christened space—Chris Johanson, Scott Hewicker, Cliff
Hengst all showed at scene/escena on more than one occasion during the first year the
gallery was open.
Scene/escena’s official motto was “Begin with what you have”—a phrase Schatz
and Klein found in the vintage home-improvement manual they referenced when building
the gallery. As “ridiculous and corny” as the words were, the phrase struck a chord with
the duo in that it spoke to the manner in which they devoted themselves to living frugally,
further resonating with their curatorial vision; “In almost every move we made, from
location to construction to advertising to curating,” recalls Klein, “we just worked with
the materials, knowledge and people we had on hand. [We] didn't necessarily have an
aesthetic vision, but our vision was one of inclusion, of meeting the needs of our friends
and people in our community.”
48

The gallery’s name was derived from Chica Escena (1996)—the title of a
collaborative zine created by Klein and Schatz about breaking up with their boyfriends—
and in that way alluded to Klein’s passion for zine culture, artist books, and related
ephemera. Klein and Shatz folded this interest into scene/escena’s programming with
shows like Bookshop (1997), which featured the handmade zines of Johanson, Hewicker,
Hengst, and many others. Klein’s involvement in independent media and San Francisco's
underground literary community continued to develop as he published and distributed

48
Klein, Darin. E-mail interview by author. November 27, 2011.

25

numerous solo and collaborative artists’ books, chapbooks and zines—publishing
projects he considered to be “exhibitions in print”—cost-efficient and immediate
alternatives to a physical gallery space. In 1999, Klein become involved with Blue
Books, a small press bookshop and gallery located on the New College campus at 766
Valencia Street. There, he curated a series of socio-politically inspired exhibitions that
featured visual art, spoken word, and self-made book arts with the primary objective of
bringing together artists, writers, and those concerned with the growth and exposure of
independent media.
The preponderance of independent media produced in the Mission during the
nineties spoke to a decidedly anti-mainstream, anti-corporate DIY ethos that functioned
as an operative ideal within the neighborhood’s art scene. In much the same way that
graffiti functioned as its own language, zines became cultural and ideological vehicles for
the artist creating them, distributed amongst and between like-minded individuals of the
community. Additionally—and just as importantly—the zine culture that flourished
within the Mission’s art community during the nineties was ostensibly rooted in a
subculture of punk music that had thrived in the neighborhood since the late 1970s.
Fanzines like RE/Search
49
(1980-2001), Homocore (1988-1991), Maximum Rock
n’ Roll (1982- ), and Outpunk (1992-1997) circulated alongside show posters and flyers
that called on the DIY production techniques of cut-and-paste letterforms, photocopied

49
RE/Search Magazine was started in 1982 by V. Vale and Andrea Juno, following the demise of Vale's
previous publication, the seminal San Francisco punk zine, Search and Destroy (1977-1979). RE/Search
kept with similar themes of punk music and underground culture, but went on to explore other
countercultural themes like transgressive literature, industrial music and culture, and body modification in
the late 1980s.

26

and collaged images, and hand-scrawled and typewritten texts. These techniques
converged into the recognizable, widely circulated graphic design aesthetic of an entire
subculture for which punk style was “both an ironic-celebratory funeral anthem for white
youth’s particular effort to change the world, and an attempt to clear new symbolic space
for an oppositional cultural stance.”
50
A succession of venues and record stores based in
the neighborhood such as Valencia Tool & Die, Target Video, and Epicenter Zone
spawned and sustained Bay Area punk bands like Flipper, The Avengers, The Nuns,
Mutants, Flipper, The Dils, Negative Trend, The Offs, the Dead Kennedys, and countless
others starting in the 1970s. Chris Johanson recalls,
I was really influenced by all the 70s punk stuff here, the art punk stuff. You
know, like William Passarelli
51
and Flipper, and all the art stuff from the 70s and
early 80s. It totally influenced me to make the art that I’m making now.
52

Like many of his artist friends, Chris Johanson was a musician, playing bass for the punk
band Tina, Age 13. Johanson illustrated the vast majority of their artwork ranging from
album covers to flyers; the cover of the band’s 1994 7” EP release “Pop Songs For Our
Friends” features one of his early drawings, rendered sketch-like in ballpoint pen on
pastel pink paper (fig. 10). In the bottom left corner of the album, at the base of what
appears to be a miniature high-rise apartment building, lays the despondent and drunk

50
Jeff Goldthorpe, “Punk Rock: Historical Essay,” Found SF, accessed February 24, 2012,
http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=PUNK_ROCK.

51
William Nicholas Passarelli was a collage and found-object artist who founded a gallery in the Mission
called Emmanuel Radnitsky’s Found Objects, after the given name of avant-garde artist Man Ray, a
significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements. Though little exists in terms of
documentation of the gallery, Johanson credits Passarelli with giving him his first show and being a very
influential figure in his life and career.

52
Megan Brian, “5 Questions: Chris Johanson,” SFMOMA: Open Space August 20, 2010, accessed
February 24, 2012, http://blog.sfmoma.org/2010/08/5-questions-chris-johanson/.

27

figure of Negatron. A bottle of liquor forever within arms reach, a small dagger threatens
to pierce his abdomen. “Hard Times” is scrawled beneath Negatron’s prostrate body,
while an arrow floating above his head points to a small cluster of stars that swirl around
the words “good times” in the sky above. At once sad and humorous, Johanson’s
illustration evokes a line from Oscar Wilde’s 1893 play Lady Windemere’s Fan (London:
Routledge/Thoemmes, 1993): “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the
stars,” an aphorism pointing to the presence of hope in the bleakest of situations.
Johanson’s deceptively simple album cover conceals the tender poignancy of the message
that lies beneath it, demonstrative of Johanson’s ever-gentle approach to dogma in the
face of disillusionment.
28

Chapter 3: San Francisco’s Dot-Com Boom: The Sound of History Repeating Itself?

What the artist values and valorizes is . . . more than the aesthetics of the old
urban quarter. The society and culture of a working-class neighborhood,
especially where this includes ethnic diversity, attracts the artist as it repels the
conventional middle classes. Identification with the dispossessed, freedom from
middle-class convention and restraints, and the vitality of working-class life
have all long been associated with the artistic, bohemian lifestyle.
53

For all of its social and cultural vibrancy, the underside of American urbanism has
nonetheless played out in the Mission through the decades—poverty, drugs, crime,
prostitution, overcrowding, neglected public resources and housing—and it was precisely
this combination of cultural vitality, urban grittiness, danger, subcultural identification,
and ethnic diversity that has made the Mission particularly attractive to generations of
young cultural producers; the inflow of young bohemians priming the Mission—a
neighborhood already ripe for urban redevelopment—for gentrification. This, in turn,
lead to a series of grassroots social movements aimed at preserving the neighborhood and
protecting its community from displacement. In his book The City and the Grassroots,
Manuel Castell puts forth a rigorous analysis of this history of social mobilization
explaining,
The community struggles and organization in the San Francisco Mission District
account both for the persistence of an autonomous Latino culture and for the
incipient process of middle class gentrification. They are also at the basis of the
improvement of social services as well as the roots of the housing crisis. The

53
Stuart Cameron and Jon Coaffee, “Art, Gentrification and Regeneration: From Artist as Pioneer to Public
Arts,” European Journal of Housing Policy 5, no. 1 (April 2005): 40.
29

complexity of the Mission’s urban reality is in fact the result of the tortuous
path undertaken by the neighborhood’s mobilization.
54

The Mission Coalition Organization (MCO) was among the more powerful voices in
neighborhood preservation during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was particularly
influential in one of San Francisco’s largest popular mobilizations against urban renewal
and redevelopment between 1967 and 1973.
55
The MCO managed to bring together
diverse social interests and ethnic groups while addressing a wide range of issues aimed
at both improving and protecting the neighborhood, in turn establishing a network of
social agencies and neighborhood organizations that would survive well beyond the
disintegration of the MCO in 1973. The MCO possessed the unique capacity to unite
grassroots organizations with institutional reform, a capacity that would develop out of
the earlier grassroots mobilization of the local Mission community and its myriad of
social and political organizations against the potential threat of an urban renewal program
in 1966.
56
However, as Castell explains,
The Mission’s urban scene expresses the two-fold outcome of this contradictory
urban mobilization: on the one hand, a valuable space whose residential quality,
cultural vitality, and economic dynamics have considerably improved while
preserving its original physical form; on the other hand, the occupation of this
space by a deprived and segregated ethnic minority, proud of its culture,

54
Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: a Cross-cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements.
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1983),137.

55
Tomás F. Summers Sandoval, Jr. provides a rigorous account of the Mission Coalition Organization’s
pivotal role in organizing the mass mobilization against urban renewal and redevelopment in his essay,
""All Those Who Care About the Mission, Stand Up With Me!" Latino Community Formation and the
MCO," in Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-1978, ed. Chris Carlsson and Lisa Ruth.
Elliott (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2011).

56
Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: a Cross-cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements.
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1983), 110.
30

although subjected to the increasing pressure of poverty, drugs, crime, and
police surveillance. The tensions and contradictions between these two realities,
both defining the Mission’s urban dynamic, became unbearable and remain so
today.
57

Despite the efforts of community activists like the MCO and the various organizations it
advanced, rents in the Mission tended to rise faster than the citywide average beginning
in the 1970s, causing many of its working-class residents—particularly those living in the
more highly gentrified northern and western areas of the Mission—to fear possible
displacement.
58

Artists moved into the North Mission, where cheap, vacant warehouse spaces
were poised to meet their live/work needs, bringing with them their alternative punk and
new-wave scenes and the bars, clubs, and stores that would buoy them. In his book
Neighborhoods in Transition: The Making of San Francisco’s Ethnic and Nonconformist
Communities, author Brian J. Godfrey hypothesizes that ethnic and nonconformist
subcultures share a joint tendency to cluster in inner-city neighborhoods like the Mission
due to the fact that they, as minority groups, both maintain a cultural detachment from
American mainstream society.
59
Godfrey emphasizes that these minority groups are
similarly drawn to particular inner-city neighborhoods due to the preexistence of distinct
socioeconomic conditions and architectural or physical attributes that are propitious to
the formation of a neighborhood that reinforces and sustains group identity; however,

57
Castells, The City and the Grassroots, 137.

58
Brian J. Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition: The Making of San Francisco's Ethnic and
Nonconformist Communities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 151. U.S. census data
pertaining to the average monthly rents and house sale prices in the Mission between 1940 and 1980 are
included in Table 13 of Godfrey’s text.

59
Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition, 205.
31

ultimately the nonconformist communities represent a rejection of facets of mainstream
culture, while the ethnic community is more dedicated to self-preservation.
60

In many ways, the Mission’s cultural topography during the 1990s correlated with
that of New York’s Lower East Side during the 1980s, comprised of layers of successive
institutions—both formal and informal—that sustained cultural production, including
galleries, workshops, performance spaces, music venues, bars, and numerous hybrids.
Like the Lower East Side, the Mission was—and still is—“a set of continuously evolving
social formations,” a neighborhood in a city where experimental culture has been
produced in a climate of resistance to the bourgeois order, and has continually been
enmeshed in questions of real estate and the staking of spatial claims.
61

The Internet gold rush that occurred in San Francisco during the 1990s resulted in
patterns of gentrification and displacement similar to those that transpired in New York
City’s Lower East Side during the real estate boom of the early 1980s. Similarly, the
effects that this gentrification and displacement had on the arts community living and
working in the East Village did in many ways emulate those that unfolded in the Mission
fourteen years later. The Mission during the 1980s and 1990s had a cultural profile
analogous to the East Village. It was a neighborhood that was home to a large, working-
class immigrant population, a powerful subcultural fringe which would gather in the

60
Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition, 216.

61
Alan Moore and Jim Cornwell, "Local History: The Art of Battle for Bohemia in New York," in
Alternative Art, New York: 1965-1985: A Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective: The
Drawing Center, New York, ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis ; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002),
324.

32

numerous dive bars, music venues, coffee shops and cheap eateries, and was crisscrossed
by streets that saw their fair share of drugs, crime, and the down-and-out.
While art critics, buyers, dealers, and makers reveled in the 1980s explosion of
New York’s East Village gallery scene, art critics, art historians, and sociologists trained
their critical lenses on the rapid urban development and gentrification transpiring in the
neighborhood under the auspices of illuminating the relationship between art, artists, and
gentrification. Analyses that emerged out of this moment—Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara
Gendel Ryan’s “The Fine Art of Gentrification,” Craig Owens’s “The Problem With
Puerilism,” and Sharon Zukin’s Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change—
were contextual, and reflective of the agents and interests involved in the mechanisms of
gentrification and displacement. Ultimately, these reflections made evident that the arts
community was playing a vital role in the process of gentrification, and that further
empirical and theoretical analysis and debate regarding the situation in the Lower East
Side was indeed necessary.
As neighborhoods, San Francisco’s Mission District and New York’s East Village
share innumerable commonalities. Historically, the Lower East Side and the Mission
have been attractive to artists for their proximity to downtown, perceived marginality,
social tolerance, and monetary appeal. Both were predominantly immigrant and working-
class neighborhoods. Both offered cheap rent and more space and were “urban” in its
most distilled formed—gritty and raw. As homes to a dense concentration of artists,
important networks for experimentation and planned or unexpected interaction were
fostered. Artists were attracted to these neighborhoods by atmospheric and aesthetic
33

elements, in addition to the range of building types. In San Francisco, this ranged from
the Victorian or Edwardian house to the derelict warehouse space.
A magnet for young, edgy artists operating on the fringes of the art world, the
East Village was the stomping ground for artists filtering through “a network of artist run
galleries established specifically for the marketing of subcultural productions (graffiti,
cartooning, and other vernacular expressions) or puerile imitations of them.”
62
Galleries
like ABC No Rio and the Fun Gallery were the first to foreground offbeat street artists
the likes of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The Mission, in much the same way,
saw small alternative for-profit galleries like the Jack Hanley Gallery, ESP, scene/escena,
and Four Walls take up residency alongside nonprofit mainstays like Southern Exposure,
the LAB, and Artists Television Access (ATA), with the similar aim of tapping into and
showcasing a thriving local network of unconventional emerging artists.
As sociologist Sharon Zukin examines in detail, New York’s live/work ordinance
and subsequent adaptive reuse of industrial architecture for artistic purposes resulted in
the popularization of the “industrial chic” aesthetic, which allowed for the transference of
“image value” from industrial spaces to contemporary apartments and condominiums
advertising “loft-living” for middle class tastes.
63
As a result, the ensuing mass-market
appeal of “loft-living” is rarely affordable for—or for that matter, sought after by—the

62
Craig Owens, “The Problem with Puerilism,” Art in America Vol.72, No. 6 (Summer 1984)

63
Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1982).

34

artists from whom this aesthetic originally derived.
64
Furthermore, while the vulnerability
of artists in the gentrification process can in this way be tied to property values and
aesthetics, it also extends into the realm of urban planning as evidenced by the 1970s and
1980s passing of live/work laws in New York and San Francisco.
In 1988, San Francisco approved its first live/work legislation, a direct result of
the highly contested eviction of artists from the Goodman Building in 1983.
65
The
importance of the struggle of the Goodman Building’s artist-tenants cannot be
underscored enough, for it ushered in a scheme for a new urban policy and coding
structure that would for all practical purposes attempt to efficiently blend the working
studio and living space into a single unit. Inspired partially by the conversions of old
industrial buildings such as Project Artaud—formerly an American Can plant in the
Northeast Mission—the new-and-improved live/work ordinance was passed in 1988 with

64
David Ley, “Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification,” Urban Studies 40, no. 12
(November 2003).

65
The Goodman Building, built in 1869 and located on the border of the Tenderloin at 1117 Geary between
Van Ness and Franklin, was one of several small residential hotels that would act as both domicile and
studio to a myriad of cultural producers subsequent to photographer H. Pierre Smith moving into the top-
floor sun-drenched studio (formerly a ballroom) in 1907. During the 1940s, rents in the Goodman Building
decreased as age betrayed architecture, its deterioration successfully managing to push its more affluent
residents out, making way for artists to move in and take advantage of its low rent, high ceilings, and
exceptional natural light. By the 1950s, the Goodman Building was populated almost entirely by writers,
dancers, musicians, designers and painters—many of whom were refugees from the Montgomery block or
other demolished or converted artist hotels—all generating and feeding off of the creative fervor and spirit
of communality that flowed between its walls. Some of the Goodman Building’s noteworthy artist-
residents include psychedelic-poster designer Wes Wilson, painter Martin Baer, video, sound and
performance artist Terry Fox, and musician Janis Joplin. Martha Senger, "Historical Essay: The Goodman
Building," FoundSF, 1996, accessed January 4, 2012,
http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Goodman_Building.

35

the objective of seamlessly merging San Francisco’s residential and commercial building
codes.
66

As commercial structures, the new live/work artist spaces were exempt from the
neighborhood school fees that other residential developments were required to pay, and
were permitted in industrial zones such as the South of Market and the Northeast
Mission. Although the live/work ordinance was passed with the intention of providing
affordable work and living space to the city’s artists, it in fact ended up being to their
detriment when the 1990s ushered in an economic boom whose epicenter was less than
fifty miles south of the city—the cradle of high-tech industry—Silicon Valley.
In January of 1996, former California State Assembly speaker Willie Brown took
office as mayor of San Francisco. It wasn’t long after that capital investment began
flooding into the city, however, its economic and political reverberations differed
significantly from the late 1970s and early-1980s Manhattanization of downtown that
triggered a powerful “vertical earthquake.”
67
This new wave of investment was driven by

66
Founded in 1971 by Joseph Krysiak and named for French avant-garde theater artist, Antonin Artaud,
Project Artaud has been host to over 70 individual artists’ live/work studios, arts-related nonprofits, small
artist businesses, studio theaters, and galleries. Project Artaud became the second warehouse conversion
project of its kind in San Francisco wherein groups of artists took over abandoned, derelict warehouses and
converted them into individual live/work studios. While projects such as this were underway in the early
1970s there were no strict codes in place to cover and regulate these live-work spaces.

67
The investment that poured into the city during the 1970s and 1980s came primarily from the vaults of
banks and tax syndicates, and resulted in an upswing of unregulated growth in the transportation and
housing sectors. This growth spurt was not without its socio-political ramifications, however, and it didn’t
take long for a grassroots slow-growth movement led by white middle class professionals and
neighborhood activists to be set into motion. This movement was largely influential in the development and
1986-passing of Proposition M, legislation that imposed stringent caps and controls on future high-rise
office development. “Vertical earthquake” is a term deployed by legendary San Francisco Chronicle writer
Herb Caen in an article of the same name wherein he bemoans the wave of redevelopment hitting the city,
and its threat to San Francisco’s “unique soul” and beauty. Herb Caen, Herb Caen's San Francisco, 1976-
1991, ed. Irene Mecchi (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992), 120-122.

36

an inundation of eager Internet dot-com entrepreneurs backed by funding furnished by
Silicon Valley venture capitalists hungry to drop start-up anchor in the “Multimedia
Gulch” of the city’s South of Market district, an area described by a 1994 issue of
Fortune Magazine as
A new hot spot for high-tech startups . . . a warehouse district hard by the ramps
to the Bay Bridge. Here's where an urban breed of computer programmer—too
hip to live in the banal suburbia of Silicon Valley—is getting together with the
city's artists to create software filled with video, animation, and music. In only a
year or two of colonization, the Gulch has become a high-tech version of New
York City's SoHo, with loft offices, trendy restaurants, and art galleries
interspersed among factories and gas stations.
68

Along with the $7.5 billion of venture capital flooding into city came a throng of young
professionals looking for an affordable, convenient, and hip neighborhood in which to
kick their feet up after a long day in front of the computer screen. The Mission—located
immediately adjacent to this burgeoning multimedia mecca—offered these amenities and
more.
69
In his analysis of Chicago’s Wicker Park Neighborhood, sociologist Richard
Lloyd discusses this phenomenon in terms of how artists and other cultural producers
retain their presence in the area while becoming “avatars of human consumption”

68
Alan Deutschman, “San Francisco’s Multimedia Gulch,” Fortune, March 7, 1994, accessed 2012,
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1994/03/07/79070/index.htm.

69
It is important to note that the Mission is not necessarily an exception to the gentrification rule—San
Francisco as a whole is a city prone to high levels of gentrification, as pointed out in a 2000 report by S.V.
Alejandrino for the Mission Economic Development Association entitled Gentrification in San Francisco’s
Mission District: Indicators and Policy Recommendations. San Francisco’s housing supply has historically
been greatly constrained due to its close proximity to Silicon Valley companies and an urban dynamism
that was particularly attractive to young entry-level professionals. This, in addition to the fact the Mission
is one of the warmest and sunniest of San Francisco’s neighborhoods, offers two BART stops, and is within
walking distance of other popular neighborhoods like the Castro and Noe Valley, contributes to the
Mission’s domestic appeal. Alejandrino, Simon Velasquez. Gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission
District: Indicators and Policy Recommendations. San Francisco: Mission Economic Development
Association, Summer 2000.

37

wherein skilled service workers and other urban cosmopolitans converge on the area for
“bohemian and offbeat fare” and to consume “authentic experiences” and “cultural
offerings.”
70

The high-tech spark continued to creep up the dot-com fuse, and real estate
developers swiftly took notice, sniffing out opportunities to tap into the economic
wellspring in the hopes of siphoning some of it off into their own coffers. The Northeast
Mission district—home to a sizable cluster of inexpensive, mostly-vacant industrial
warehouse spaces—provided the perfect knot by which to secure the loophole real estate
developers were poised to leap through.
71

Non-union developers like the Residential Builders Association (RBA) held their
breath for the loophole provided by the 1988s live/work ordinance. By deploying the
live/work rhetoric—which placed these projects under the same regulatory umbrella as
commercial spaces—in their development schemes, the RBA was able to avoid required
city fees (such as contributions to the local school district), and skirt around traditionally
stringent regulatory compliances such as those outlined in the Americans With

70
Richard Lloyd, “The Neighborhood in Cultural Production: Material and Symbolic Resources in the New
Bohemia,” City and Community 3, no. 4 (2004): 346; and Richard D. Lloyd, Neo-bohemia: Art and
Commerce in the Postindustrial City (New York: Routledge, 2006).

71
The 1970s through the early 1990s saw the gradual closure of many of the Northeast Mission’s larger
industrial plants in what was in large part due to the broad restructuring of global capital markets. The
Koret clothing company, which once employed 700 people, closed in 1990, and the Best Foods mayonnaise
factory, which by 1990 still employed 145 people, moved to Guatemala in the same year. The Lilli Ann
clothing company, which had employed 360 people, closed in 1995. These industrial spaces were by no
means left to rust, however, as indicated by a 1991 study conducted by the Mission Economic
Development Association which showed a sharp rise in service businesses and art-related services on the
heels of these closures as the vacant industrial spaces left in their wake were commandeered. Services—
such as auto repair and body shops—and manufacturing accounted for nearly 60% of the more than 7,500
jobs in the Northeast Mission (consequently dubbed the Trans-Mission) during this time.
Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition, NEMIZ History: A Snapshot of the Mission’s Industrial District (San
Francisco, CA: Coalition, 2006), 3; Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition, The Hidden Costs of the New
Economy: A Study of the Northeast Mission Industrial Zone (San Francisco: Coalition, 2000)
38

Disabilities Act. Building these luxury lofts under the live/work rubric also meant that
developers were exempt from the requirement—one that all residential housing built in
San Francisco was required to heed—that a minimum of 10% of the newly constructed
units be affordable. As developers commenced building in earnest, they quickly
discerned that the San Francisco Planning Department and Department of Building
Inspection largely neglected to enforce perhaps the most important requirement of all—
that the units be occupied by working artists, or at the very least were being used as both
working and living spaces by their tenants.
As luxury lofts proliferated, dot-com businesses—calling themselves “business-
service industry”—began creeping into the Northeast Mission, circumventing a
preexisting ban on office buildings in industrial zones. The price of rent in the
neighborhood doubled—in many cases tripled—and evictions in and around the Mission
skyrocketed. From 1999 to 2000 the Mission had the highest eviction rate in the city,
with over 600 documented Ellis Act evictions in one year.
72
The Mission community
began to feel both threatened and destabilized as family-run businesses, nonprofits, art

72
San Francisco Tenants Union. “Ellis Act Evictions.” San Francisco Tenants Union. Accessed January 7,
2012. http://www.sftu.org/ellis.html. The “Ellis Act” is a California state law granting landlords the
unconditional right to evict tenants to “go out of business.” For an Ellis eviction, the landlord is required to
remove all of the units in the building from the rental market, evicting all of the buildings tenants in lieu of
singling out a single tenant with low rent and/or removing just one unit from the rental market. When a
landlord invokes the Ellis Act, the vacated units are prohibited from being re-rented at any price higher
than what the evicted tenant was paying for five years following the evictions. While restrictions do exist in
regard to re-renting the units, there are no such restrictions on converting them to ownership units (i.e.
tenancies in common or condominiums). Through loopholes in condo law, Ellis Act evictions are most
often used to “change the use” of the building—converting the rental units into condominiums or multi-unit
buildings into single-family homes.

39

and performance spaces, and community services were being pushed out along with
longtime neighborhood residents who did not have resources to fight their evictions.
73

The face of the Mission was changing as trendy bars, boutiques, and restaurants
with valet parking attendants began to replace mom-and-pop bodegas and taquerias, and
the local and national media took notice. The Mission, though fighting its own battle to
preserve its cultural authenticity under intense economic pressures, stood as an example
of neighborhoods just like it both state and nationwide—culturally rich, working class
neighborhoods that were facing the same powerful forces of gentrification. At the peak of
the boom in January of 1999, the New York Times printed “In Old Mission District,
Changing Grit to Gold,” an article chronicling the stark reality of the changes being
inflicted upon the neighborhood and the gentrification that threatened to snuff out the
Mission’s cultural vitality:
More and more, people here worry that these changes have come at a heavy cost
to the Mission's working-class residents. For all its grit, the Mission has played
an important role in a city where prices were already extraordinarily high and
low-income housing especially scarce. It has been a cultural center for Hispanic
people in the Bay Area, the one neighborhood where new immigrants knew they
could find a home. Now, there is a fear that as San Francisco becomes more
affluent, the ingredients that made the Mission District unique will be lost.
74

Some accounts, like Paulina Borsook’s notorious article for Salon.com “How the Internet
ruined San Francisco,” abandoned all semblances of journalism objectivity, making little

73
Boom: The Sound of Eviction, dir. Francine Cavanaugh, A. Mark Liiv, and Adams Wood (San Francisco:
Whispered Media, 2001), YouTube. Those evicted were predominantly elderly and working class
immigrants for whom English was a second language.

74
Evelyn Nieves, “In Old Mission District, Changing Grit to Gold,” New York Times, January 21, 1999,
accessed January 9, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/21/us/in-old-mission-district-changing-grit-to-
gold.html.
40

effort to conceal deep-seated disdain for dot-com culture and the changes it was thrusting
upon the city:
So what’s the big deal? Isn’t the dot-com invasion just the latest example of
gentrification — a phenomenon that started in the go-go ’80s? In a sense, yes —
but the speed, libertarian ethos, irritating hipster pose and chilling finality of this
invasion put it in a different league from earlier ones . . . Now San Francisco has
become a city of 22-year-old Barbie-bunny marketing girls who don’t realize the
Web is not the Internet, and guys who have come to San Francisco because the
dot-com version of Dutch tulip-mania offers better odds of instant wealth than
making partner at Merrill Lynch. The result is a city whose unique history and
sensibility is being swamped by twerps with ‘tude.
75

Local media followed what was happening in the Mission with exceptional fervor. In
1998, the San Francisco Bay Guardian dedicated its entire thirty-third anniversary issue
to examining the “unnatural disaster of epic proportions” threatening the city—
threatening to destroy its very heart and soul.
76
SFBG—true to its activist roots—offered
its readers a list of possible actions to individually and collectively stave off
gentrification such as flexing their power at the polls by supporting pro-tenant, anti-
displacement legislation and the politicians who advocate for those causes, supporting
locally owned businesses and boycotting chain stores, or joining a tenants group like the
San Francisco Tenants Union.
While the mainstream press reported from their downtown media fortresses,
underground publication the Turd Filled Donut was being written, published, and
distributed from the trenches in the street. During the height of the dot-com boom, Erick
Lyle—under the moniker Iggy Scam—and his friend Ivy Jeanne McClelland used their

75
Paulina Borsook, “How the Internet Ruined San Francisco,” Salon.com, October 28, 1999, accessed
2012, http://www.salon.com/1999/10/28/internet_2/.

76
Tim Redmond, “A City Transformed,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, October 7, 1998, 33rd Anniversary
ed.
41

street rag the Turd-Filled Donut (the TDF) to chronicle dot-com gentrification, and its
effect on San Francisco’s destitute, from the vantage point of a 20-something train-
hopping punks living off of public assistance in the Tenderloin. Fueled by cheap donut-
shop coffee, a bittersweet love affair with San Francisco urban life, and a determination
to face San Francisco’s underbelly towards the sun, the TFD’s beat was one of
impromptu generator shows, squats, protests and demonstrations, and a string of 6
th
Street
Single Room Occupancies (SRO). As evictions were happening en masse, the editors of
the TFD were telling the street’s side of the story—challenging the pro-growth, pro-
development politics of mainstream newspapers like the San Francisco Examiner, and
writing about everything mainstream media was turning a blind eye to—the dirty stuff,
the unsightly stuff, the shady stuff, the absurd stuff. Lyle explains,
[The] paper wouldn’t have made sense if there weren’t a context of community,
of being in a city where there are defined neighborhoods. It was about taking
people that aren’t normally part of the debate and trying to give them a voice,
because it’s understood that there is this public place where we should be able to
talk with everybody else.
77

The TDF was produced in true punk, DIY fashion, much of it handwritten, edited with an
X-Acto knife, whiteout, and tape and printed on photocopiers “borrowed” from Kinkos.
Barry McGee helped source one of the publications first newspaper boxes for street-level
distribution, while Chris Johanson—who ran in the same punk circles as Lyle—lent his
talents to the homespun publication. Johanson’s malcontent urban dwellers meandered
across the fourth issues cover, each representative of the conflicting political and
ideological positions assumed by residents new and old in the dot-com melée of

77
“Scam Zine's Erick Lyle,” interview by Arwen Curry, Maximum Rock N' Roll, September 10, 2010,
accessed March 2, 2012, http://maximumrocknroll.com/scam-zines-erick-lyle/.
42

redevelopment (fig. 11). Drawn with black Sharpie in Johanson’s signature, rudimentary
style, speech bubbles above each characters’ heads read as though plucked straight off a
page of the Mission gentrification script: “Don’t hate me because of my loft space,”
“This used to be an Irish neighborhood,” “This is one of the most special cities,” “Fuck
up all the nice cars. Fuck shit up,” and the percipient, “I feel a lot of tension and energy.”
The Turd Filled Donut—suspicious of mainstream press, and conscious of the
role and function of the newspaper—was in many ways fashioned as a satire of the San
Francisco Chronicle:

So what you’re talking about when you’re losing newspapers is a decline of that
public space. Even though the newspapers are a for-profit concern, there’s a
democratic ideal behind it, that they’re part of the place where everybody’s
going to be represented in some way. Even though we know that’s not really
true, it’s a framework to even rebel against, you know? How are you going to
rebel against that if it doesn’t exist?
78

Inside the TDF #4 one could read the “Turd Caen” column (the name riffing off famed
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen), filled with the gossip of the down-and-
out; a piece about a gay off-duty police offer who was paid to harass the homeless in the
Castro; a report on police officers who issue the most "quality of life" citations; a
survivor writing about the fire at the SRO Thor Hotel; a 6th Street treasure hunt for a six-
pack of beer; a talk with a researcher at the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society about the
Compton’s Cafeteria transgender riot on Turk Street in San Francisco in 1966, which pre-
dated the Stonewall riots by three years; workfare workers exposed to hazardous
chemicals; and crashing the Chinese New Year Parade. Perhaps the biggest coup for the

78
“Scam Zine's Erick Lyle,” interview by Arwen Curry, Maximum Rock N' Roll, September 10, 2010,
accessed March 2, 2012, http://maximumrocknroll.com/scam-zines-erick-lyle/.
43

issue, however, was Ivy’s interview with the Mayor Willie Brown in which he was
quoted as saying,
I say to people who are poverty-stricken, I know how much you love San
Francisco, but because of the nature of cost of living here you are better off
being poverty-stricken where the cost of living is not so great.
79

79
“Interview with Willie Brown,” interview by Ivy McClelland, The Turd Filled Donut #4, December
1998.

44

Chapter 4: Artists Mobilize and an Art Scene Thrives

The economic forces that are transforming San Francisco can seem both
invisible and unstoppable . . . the changes taking place in the city are not just
economic, they’re political—and there are a lot of things that you can do to
prevent the total gentrification of this city. The first step is to recognize that
this is a crisis that needs immediate, aggressive attention.
80

Buttressed by its history of grassroots activism, and the indigenous institutions and local
media in place to support it, neighborhood resentment in the Mission soon
metamorphosed into mobilization. As 1.75 million square feet of high-tech office space
in the Mission was being groomed for 200 dot-com businesses to move into the
neighborhood, local activist groups began organizing themselves in earnest. The
Coalition for Jobs, Art, and Housing (CJAH) was formed with the primary objective of
lobbying to reform the live/work law as a means of negating its misappropriation by
greedy real estate developers. Artist Debra Walker—a member of the CJAH—was living
in a nonprofit artists’ building and was keenly aware of the pitfalls of the 1988 live/work
ordinance from its inception:
Artists in City Hall were adamant that they did not want to be defined, so not
only did we ask for special housing or special zoning, we refused to be part of
any solution for enforcement. It was really the artists who screwed themselves
on this, because artists didn’t want to be defined. I don’t think the answer is to
take a group of people and make special housing for them. If live/work had to be
affordable housing, it would’ve been a lot more successful and [the regulations]
would have been harder to get around.
81

80
Tim Redmond and Daniel Zoll, “Fighting Back: What San Francisco Can Do to Control Its Own
Economic Destiny,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, October 7, 1998, 33rd Anniversary ed., accessed
February 2, 2012,
http://web.archive.org/web/20050503075946/http://www.sfbg.com/News/33/01/Features/solutions.html.

81
Debra Walker interview with Rebecca Solnit, as quoted in Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg,
Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (London: Verso, 2000),
102.
45

In April 2000, two massive redevelopment projects acted as the final sparks that exploded
the powder keg of opposition that was steadily growing in the Mission—the conversion
of the massive (and vacant) National Guard Armory on 14
th
and Mission into high-tech
office space by Eikon Investments, and the development of “Bryant Square,” a complex
of multimedia and high-tech office spaces by SKS Investments on a 20
th
and Bryant
industrial site.
With the Armory project poised to drive the already skyrocketing rents in the area
up even further, and the proposed Bryant Square development threatening to evict and
displace the existing tenants that consisted of small, local design and manufacturing
businesses and over four dozen artists, community nonprofit and activist groups came
together to form the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition (MAC).
82
Acting as the vox
populi for anti-dot-com sentiment, MAC led a number of protests from the Mission to
City Hall, temporarily shut down the Planning Commission, invaded dot-com offices, and
held sit-ins at the Planning Department. Stoking the flames of resistance in the Mission,
MACs weekly meetings and street actions significantly swelled in numbers. Eventually,
MAC managed to successfully put a halt to the Armory project, but was not as successful
in stopping the Bryant Square project which San Francisco’s notoriously pro-

82
MAC’s primary aim was to prevent the displacement of the working class, predominately Latino, tenant
population in the Mission. Some of the groups brought together under this initiative included the Mission
Economic Development Agency, Mission Housing Development Coalition, tenant organizing groups
Mission Agenda and St. Peter’s Housing Committee, the Day Laborers’ Program, and the Latino
environmental justice group People Organizing to Demand Out Economic and Environmental Rights
(PODER!). Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition. “Who We Are.” MAC SF. July 2008. Accessed
February 02, 2012. http://missionantidisplacement.blogspot.com/.

46

development Board of Supervisors voted 8 to 3 in favor of, effectively giving it the green
light.
Meanwhile, artists and nonprofit art organizations were by no means standing by
idly. While a number of cultural centers in the Mission came under threat of eviction,
artists rallied in earnest to come to their defense. AARGH! (All Against Ruthless Greedy
Gentrification) mobilized to organize a five-hour performance at Dancers’ Group
Footwork, protesting the 500 percent rent increase that was forcing the group to evacuate
its space after eighteen years of residency there. The performance led to a three-day
occupation of the building, resulting in 10 arrests. AARGG! eventually evolved into the
Artists’ Eviction Defense Coalition (AEDC), whose first organized action, Silent
Symphony, involved several dozen activists in evening clothes at the opening San
Francisco Symphony, exposing the well-to-do art patrons to the silencing of the city’s
vibrant art local community that was occurring as a result of the widespread evictions and
displacement.
83

In addition to the traditional grassroots activism taking the form of protests, sit-
ins, and neighborhood meetings, dot-com resentment manifested in a markedly more
subversive manner as progressive artists engaged in anti-gentrification graffiti, postering,
community art projects, and performances in and around the Mission.
84
Large scale
posters with comic-book inspired graphics began appearing across the neighborhood with
a satire-steeped slogan that read, “Come Enjoy the Mission: Cleaner, Whiter, Brighter

83
Sam Whiting, “Groups That Keep the Heat On.” San Francisco Chronicle, October 18, 2000, C - 1 sec.

84
Lessley Anderson, “There Goes the Neighborhood.” The Industry Standard, July 3, 2000. Accessed
February 9, 2012, http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard.
47

Tablecloths” (fig. 12). This was the work of the San Francisco Print Collective (SFPC), a
collective of ten silkscreen artists that came together in February 2000 to collaborate on a
poster campaign that would address the impact of gentrification on the Mission.
The SFPC based itself at Mission Gráfica, a community-based, nonprofit
printshop founded in 1977 that functioned as the graphics department in the Mission
Cultural Center. The SFPC took much of their inspiration from the Chicano Poster
Movement that arose at the end of the 1960s, while also tapping into San Francisco's rich
history of political graphic arts of which Mission Gráfica and other groups such as the
San Francisco Poster Brigade were important parts. The primary venue for their work
was on the streets of San Francisco—particularly the Mission—designing and posting a
variety of posters for various community causes, including ongoing support for the
Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition, the Coalition on Homelessness, and the anti-war
movement. Working anonymously, the SFPC prioritized community empowerment over
individual artistic success, striving to make accessible art in public space that challenged
the mass media, and broadcasted politically-charged messages that addressed immediate,
local issues directly to the streets.
While the SFPC plastered the neighborhood and commandeered sanctioned
advertising spaces with their politicized anti-gentrification message, the Mission Yuppie
Eradication Project (MYEP) was exercising an equally visible—but markedly more
extreme—voice of opposition. Started in the summer of 1998, The Mission Yuppie
Eradication Project was the brainchild of artist, activist, and Mission resident Kevin
Keating, who worked under the moniker Nestor Makhno (the Russian peasant leader who
48

fought the Bolsheviks in the Russian revolution). Together with a small revolving group
of friends, Keating printed and posted several hundred posters touting rancorous anti-
gentrification actions around the Mission. As Keating expounds,
The posters communicated an extremist message in clear, simple language,
avoiding Marxist or anarchist buzz-words. I described the process of
gentrification without using the word "gentrification." And these posters had a
much greater impact than any other effort I've been involved in because they
targeted cars. Targeting cars drew attention to the problem of displacement like
nothing else could because nothing is more important to an American's sense of
who they are in the world than their car.
85

The first wave of MYEP posters (fig. 13) predictably reflected Keating’s sentiments,
advocating for the vandalism of any luxury SUV found parked in the neighborhood
streets. The second wave of posters, printed in both English and Spanish, were a series of
caustic reviews of four new restaurants in the Mission perceived as “yuppie magnets
attracting settlers to the ‘hood.”
86

Similar dissident tactics were employed by Seismic Solution, voted in the 1998
“Best of the Bay” issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian for “Best Political Posters.”
Working under a veil of anonymity, this group of “graphic designers by day—rebels by
night” wheatpasted posters throughout the Mission and elsewhere, deploying visual
language pilfered from World War I- and World War II-era propaganda posters, warning

85
Kevin Keating, “San Francisco's 'Mission Yuppie Eradication Project': A Critical Analysis,” Mute:
Culture and Politics After the Net, July 13, 2010, accessed September 30, 2011,
http://www.metamute.org/community/your-posts/san-franciscos-mission-yuppie-eradication-project-
critical-analysis.

86
Ibid.

49

and hazard signs, and conventional advertising (fig. 14).
87
Oscillating between comedy
and ominousness, the Seismic Solution posters and stickers were guileful protests of the
over-gentrification of San Francisco meant to “cheerfully postulate what effects a repeat
of the 1906 or 1989 earthquakes might have on skyrocketing rents, sparse parking, and
the city's recent proliferation of Blockbusters and Pasta Pomodoros.”
88
With posters
proclaiming “When the Big One hits you’ll finally have a chance to use your four-wheel
drive” as a caption to a sequence of Ford Explorers, and “I’m Coming” with the
accompanying image of a child crouched under a school desk, the messages disseminated
by Seismic Solutions on the streets of San Francisco were ultimately intended as oblique
social commentary, inspiring both laughter and serious thought about the state of the
city.
89

Perhaps one of the more overtly political collectives staging creative interventions
into city space during the dot-com boom was a guerilla art group led by artist Andy Cox
called Together We Can Defeat Capitalism (TWCDC). A motley crew of “culture
jammers” taking cues from revolutionary groups like the Situationist International,
TWCDC saw the dot-com boom as symptom—a local manifestation—of the larger socio-
economic problem of capitalism, the ramifications of which had been predicated on

87
“Best of the Bay: Urban Living.” San Francisco Bay Guardian: Best of the Bay Edition. 1998. Accessed
February 10, 2012, http://www.rockinvan.com/resume/bob_1998/urban.html.

88
Sam Williams, “The Medium Is the Message: A New Generation of Bay Area ‘Culture Jammers’
Manipulates Media Manipulation.” San Francisco Bay Guardian, April 14, 1999. Accessed February 10,
2012, http://web.archive.org/web/20050211102421/http://www.sfweekly.com/extra/culturejam.html.

89
Williams, “The Medium Is the Message: A New Generation of Bay Area ‘Culture Jammers’ Manipulates
Media Manipulation.”

50

globalization and imperialism. In response, TWCDC led a series of subversive actions
aimed at highlighting the shortfalls of the capitalist system—the increasing gap between
rich and poor, social security, and the erosion of benefits for immigrants.
90
Between 1997
and 2000, TWCDC instigated a renegade campaign of stencils, stickers, posters, and
modified signage in public spaces throughout the city.
In July 1998, TWCDC’s Andy Cox conceptualized a new project:
I was standing in a BART station one day staring at a Commuter Channel screen
when a colorful ad appeared encouraging people to place ads: “Advertise Your
Business,” it pleaded. That planted a seed. I'd noticed that passengers either
checked the screens frequently for train destination information, or stared at
them blankly and continuously, like me. People wanted to catch their trains.
They needed to look at the screens. The screens needed to be subverted. People
don't have the same reason to look at billboards. There was never any question
that I had to do something on the Commuter Channel.
91

Posing as the fictitious firm “Conceptual Designs,” Cox paid $800 to air the video
message “Capitalism - Stops at Nothing” on the destination screens at the Powell and
Montgomery BART stations—both located in the commercial and financial heart of the
city—to unsuspecting commuters (fig. 15).
The “video insertion” started running on Wednesday, July 1, 1997.
92
The
following day, TWCDC held an opening reception for the piece on the platform of the
Montgomery station during commute hours where they handed out “July 4
th
survival

90
Julie Lynem, “Artist Group's Quick-as-a-Blink BART Ad: Anti-capitalism Message Flashes on
Destination Signs,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 6, 1998, A ed., sec. 15, accessed February 9, 2012,
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/07/06/MN74589.DTL.

91
Andy Cox, interview by Anna McCarthy, TWCDC, accessed March 2, 2012,
http://www.twcdc.com/documents/mccarthy_interview.htm.

92
Ibid.

51

kits” that included a patriotic cookie, flag toothpick, flag napkin, red-white-and-blue
balloons, a commentary on freedom of speech, and extracts from the US laws on
desecration of the flag. The aim of the “Capitalism - Stops at Nothing” advertisement,
according to Cox, was to “inject a contradictory message into a public space [that] would
raise questions about a society where inequality is getting worse, where corporate control
is so strong.”
93
Soon after it started running, the ad was met with opposition. Metro
Channel—the company in charge of soliciting advertising for the Commuter Channel
screen at the BART stations—claimed that several people who had seen the ad had
contacted the company to log complaints, and temporary removed it from the system in
response. BART officials requested that Cox approve a disclaimer that would run before
the ad saying: “The following paid advertisement does not necessarily reflect the views
of BART, Metrochannel, or their employees.” Although he initially resisted the
disclaimer, Cox realized that it would in actuality add to the piece by drawing more
attention to it. At the tail end of the dot-com boom in 2000, TWCDC embarked on a
series of actions that consisted of highly visible messages displayed to motorized and
pedestrian traffic using large mobile electronic message boards similar to those used by
CALTRAIN road crews to alert motorists to road construction and traffic accidents.
TWCDC selected strategic locations to broadcast messages expressing “the reservations
of many people about the corporate agenda, the dot-com feeding frenzy, big-money

93
Bob Armstrong, “Subway Guerilla Artists,” The Progressive, September 1, 1998, accessed March 2,
2012, http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Subway+guerrilla+artists.-a021132615.

52

politics, the widening income gap and other problems related to capitalism.”
94
In front of
a billboard for California Cheese proclaiming it’s “What Feeds All Those Start-Ups,”
TWCDC positioned a sign reading, “IT’S NOT THE CHEESE—IT’S THE GREED” (fig
17). Nearby, in SoMa’s multi-media gulch a sign cautioned, “DANGER—DIGITAL
DIVIDE AHEAD.” In front of SFMOMA, TWCDC’s blinking construction sign
exhorted, “NO OVER-TAKING—OF ART BY BIG BUSINESS” (fig 18).
Between July and August 2000, Megan Wilson—a member of TWCDC who was
being threatened with eviction—joined forces with artists Lise Swenson and Gordon
Winiemko to organize Art Strikes Back,
95
a series of situational actions and performance
events that unfolded over the course of six weekends along the Mission’s “Valencia
Corridor” (Valencia Street between 16
th
and 22
nd
Streets) and in Clarion Alley. Rallying
around the slogan “All action, no meetings,” the highly visible, often confrontational
performances for Art Strikes Back were conceived in direct response to the rampant
gentrification and displacement occurring in the Mission, and with the explicit objective
of galvanizing the community and placing these issues on the forefront of political and

94
Together We Can Defeat Capitalism. “MAY 1ST GUERRILLA ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN WILL
CONFRONT CAPITALISM.” News release, San Francisco, CA, 2000. Together We Can Defeat
Capitalism.

95
The project name “Art Strikes Back” is an intentional reference to the 1990-1993 “Art Strike” organized
by artist Stuart Home. According to Home, the 1990 Art Strike was called as a means of encouraging
critical debate around the concept of art: “While certain individuals will put down their tools and cease to
make, distribute, sell, exhibit or discuss their cultural work for a three-year period beginning on January 1,
1990, the numbers involved will be so small that the strike is unlikely to force the closure of any galleries
or other art institutions. It will, however, demonstrate that the socially imposed hierarchy of the arts can be
aggressively challenged.” Home, Stewart. "About the Art Strike." http://www.stewarthomesociety.org.
December 27, 1989. Accessed February 9, 2012. http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/features/artstrik3.htm.
53

media agendas.
96
Art Strikes Back didn’t turn down any of the proposals it received—
over 50 artists participated in the project, contributing an eclectic range of works that
included agitprop street theater, dances, performative interventions, and community
murals.
One of the more poignant actions offered by Art Strikes Back was Wilson’s
Better Homes and Gardens (2000) for which she fabricated and hand painted 250
plywood signs with the single word “Home”—the “H” embellished with a painted
flower—in black paint on a colored background, which she then distributed to
neighborhood residents, the homeless, and small neighborhood businesses. (fig. 18)
According to Wilson, by placing the single-word message throughout neighborhoods in
San Francisco Better Homes and Gardens (2000) appropriated the “multiple-site tactic”
used by advertisers as a means of raising the consciousnesses of San Franciscans around
the critical issue of displacement—drawing attention to the importance—and ultimate
fragility—of home.
97
People walking through the Mission streets would see the word on
Wilson’s signs posted in local shop and apartment windows, reminding them that the
neighborhood was a home to many, and worth protecting and fighting for.
98

96
Art Strikes Back was indeed successful in receiving the media exposure they desired, garnering coverage
not only in locally in the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Bay Guardian, but in national and
international press ranging from National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, to the Los Angeles Times,
Baltimore Sun, Seattle Weekly, and the UK’s Daily Telegraph.

97
Megan Wilson, “Megan Wilson: Projects.” 2003. Accessed February 10, 2012,
http://www.meganwilson.com/projects/109_Better%20Homes%20and%20Gardens/1_betterhomes.php.

98
In addition to the smaller hand painted signs, Wilson’s project Home/Casa (2000) involved her painting
two large 7 x10 foot signs on the pavement at each entrance of Clarion Alley as part of the Clarion Alley
Mural Project. As though oversized welcome mats greeting those passing through the alley, the sign at the
Valencia Street entrance of the alley read "Home," the other at the Mission Street entrance reading “Casa.”

54

The year following the performances, Art Strikes Back co-organizer Lise
Swenson collaborated with Southern Exposure to begin production on Mission Movie,
with funding provided by the Creative Work Fund,
99
whose primary objective was to
explore the changing character of the Mission, and showcase the neighborhood’s artists,
community organizers, small business owners, and cultural workers:
Through Mission Movie, the collaborators are creating a narrative that represents
the many visions and voices that reflect the Mission District, including those
that have moved there recently, in an effort to understand the complexity of this
multi-faceted neighborhood. The project’s goal is to bring forward the anger and
fear many have felt into a conversation about the place and deeper
understanding of what the neighborhood is and can be.
100

Swenson—well known for her exceptionally collaborative practice—and the core movie
production crew reached out to members of the Mission community to assemble a
Community Advisory Group for the film whose purpose of this group was to supervise
and scrutinize every aspect of the films production, ranging from the conception of the
script to the promotion of the final print. Despite her extensive experience in
documentary filmmaking, Swenson conceived Mission Movie as a scripted film
performed by local actors. Despite its best intentions, the film that resulted received
predominately unfavorable reviews by critics who managed to catch one of its few
festival screenings:

99
The Creative Work Fund was launched in 1994 in response to declining financial support for artists and
new art works in the Bay Area. The Columbia Foundation, Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, Miriam and
Peter Haas Fund, and Walter and Elise Haas Fund came together as the Creative Work Fund to invite artists
and nonprofit organizations to create new art works through collaborations, “uphold the role of artists as
problem solvers, and promote the production of art as a profound contribution to intellectual inquiry and to
the strengthening of communities.” “About the Creative Work Fund.” Creative Work Fund. June 2001.
Accessed February 10, 2012. http://www.creativeworkfund.org/modern/about.html.

100
“Creative Work Fund Grantee Lise Swenson.” Creative Work Fund. June 2001. Accessed February 10,
2012. http://www.creativeworkfund.org/modern/bios/lise_swenson.html.
55

Well-meaning attempt at collective filmmaking in San Francisco's Mission
District, "Mission Movie" only succeeds in lavishly pooling inexperience.
Helmer Lise Swenson's field of expertise is documentaries, and her cast comes
largely from theater. The result is an over-telegraphed, point-making
hodgepodge of imperfectly processed epiphanies with all the subtlety of
commedia dell'arte and no visual stylization to temper the stereotypes. Pic's
missionary fervor is unlikely to convert beyond community venues for
neighborhood organizations.
101

Artist Television Access (ATA), located in the middle of the Valencia Corridor at 992
Valencia, served alongside Southern Exposure as production and promotional
headquarters and a “community venue” for Mission Movie. ATA has a long punk-infused
history as being an artist nexus for the cultivation of culturally aware, neighborhood-
rooted, underground media and experimental art, and the dot-com years were no
different. In addition to serving as Mission Movie production headquarters, ATA hosted a
series of film and video programs curated by Video Activist Network that dealt with
gentrification, evictions, the housing crisis, homelessness, dot-coms and the new
economy’s effect on the working class and poor. The programming not only succeeded in
foregrounding the efforts of community organizations like MAC, but also conferred
financial support by donating a portion of the proceeds from the screenings to their cause.
ATA was but a singular node in a powerful network of established Mission-based
nonprofit art organizations who provided institutional backing to cultural projects
conceived in opposition to the changes being brought upon the neighborhood by the dot-
com boom, and preserving the past, present, and future of the community there. Galería
de la Raza, for example, launched the Digital Mural Project with the project Y2K: A

101
Ronnie Scheib, “Mission Movie,” review of Mission Movie, Variety, August 19, 2004, accessed March
2, 2012, http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117924665?refcatid=31.
56

History of Displacement (1999), a mural created by John Leaños with students of the San
Francisco School of Arts that “sought to activate historical memory by juxtaposing
advanced capitalistic techno-visions of a futuristic monoculture informed by historical
amnesia with erased people and culture that once occupied the space of the Mission.”
102

While also recognizing the profound legacy of the community mural in the Mission, the
Digital Mural Project acknowledged the pervasive language of advertising being brought
into the neighborhood by an influx of corporate billboards, thereby highlighting the
conceptual and aesthetic discordance that resulted. Other works in the Digital Mural
Project included eVicted (2000) by Albert Lujan (fig. 19), and Ese, The Last Mexican in
the Mission (2000) by the collective Los Über-Locos.
103
(fig. 20)
Despite the shake-up caused by the dot-com boom and subsequent bust in the
early 2000s, San Francisco’s artists were consistently supported by a strong network of
long-established spaces interspersed throughout each of the cities discrete
neighborhoods—nonprofits like the Luggage Store in the Tenderloin, New Langton Arts
in SoMa, and Intersection for the Arts in the Mission; large-scale, flagship institutions
like the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) and the San Francisco Museum of
Contemporary Art (SFMOMA) downtown; and academic institutions such as the San
Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and California College of the Arts (CCA, formerly CCAC

102
Galería De La Raza, "DIGITAL MURAL PROJECT By John Leaños & SFSA Students," Galería De La
Raza:, November 2000, accessed March 12, 2012,
http://www.galeriadelaraza.org/eng/events/index.php?op=view.

103
Ese, The Last Mexican in the Mission (2000), commented on the cultural whitewashing of the
neighborhood by parodying the early 20
th
century story of Ishi the last member of the Yahi tribe in
California. Ese, The Last Mexican in the Mission (2000) also included a live public performance that took
place as part of Art Strikes Back.
57

for California College of Arts and Craft) that were not only nurturing a pedagogic
groundwork for the city’s emerging artists, but connections between students that would
lead to their ongoing collaborations post-graduation.
During the late 1990s, the Mission was undeniably at the center of this warren—
saturated with assorted art spaces that ranged from longer-established nonprofits such
Artist Television Access, Southern Exposure, the LAB, and Galería de la Raza, to
smaller, alternative, for-profit galleries such as Four Walls, ESP, the Jack Hanley
Gallery, and scene/escena. As Clark Buchner points out in his article “Profit Free Zone,”
there were distinct limitations to the art market in San Francisco that on one hand
restricted artists and local art institutions from benefiting from the city’s growing
affluence, and on the other hand lent to the formation of an art scene that was “intimate,
accessible, and genuine.”
104
The common threat shared by alternative art spaces in and
around the Mission—whether for-profit or not—was an emphasis on the production and
consumption of art that was both rooted in—and reflective of—a community of local
artists with a shared sense of values and practices derived from a geographic location and
identity.
At the height of the boom, San Francisco Examiner art critic David Bonetti
proclaimed:
1999 was the year the San Francisco art world grew up. The entire arts
community—the museums, the galleries, the collectors, the artists themselves—
seemed finally to come to terms with the fact that culturally San Francisco was
no longer an island somewhere off the left coast of North America doing its own

104
Clark Buchner, “Profit-free Zone,” Art Review 4, no. 5 (May/June 2006), accessed September 30, 2011,
Wilson Web.
58

wacky but charming thing, but part of an international, multicultural, if you will,
artworld in which connections crisscross continents and time zones.
105

When it came to “taking the pulse of the local art world,” however, Bonetti lauded two
shows in particular—Museum Pieces: Bay Area Artists Consider the de Young at the de
Young Museum, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ (YBCA) Bay Area Now 2.
These shows functioned as indicators of not only a heightened interest on behalf of Bay
Area institutions in supporting local artists, but also an interest in showcasing the
compelling sculptural and installation work being produced in San Francisco that was
being overlooked by major institutions outside of the city, and in the international
scene.
106

Prior to the demolition and new construction of the M.H. de Young Museum in
Golden Gate Park, guest curator Glen Helfand selected 18 site-specific works to be
commissioned for the 1999 exhibition Museum Pieces. Chris Johanson took the site of
the museum—Golden Gate Park—and its dwellers as inspiration. Johanson created a
series of painted vignettes of figures such as hacky-sac players, park-bench lovers, and
drum-circle jammers, handcrafting them into an installation of drawings on paper and
acrylic on recycled wood titled The Art for the People the Animals and Plants in no

105
David Bonetti, "The Coming of Age of Art in the City: From a Wacky Reputation to Forefront of the
World Scene," San Francisco Examiner, December 31, 1999, accessed February 10, 2012,
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/e/a/1999/12/31/WEEKEND7551.dtl&ao=all.

106
In 2000, artist Amy Berk attributed the heightened attention on Bay Area artists to a trickle down effect
that the newly inaugurated SFMOMA, and to a lesser extent the opening of the Yerba Buena Center for the
Arts in 1991, had on the status of the local art community. In addition to the growth of these flagship
cultural institutions, Berk noted that the affluence and power generated by the dot-com boom also managed
to garner a significant amount of attention for what was happening culturally in San Francisco. Amy Berk,
“Forever on the Move: San Francisco Bay Area Overview,” World Sculpture News, Winter 2000, 30.
59

Hierarchy of Importance Order, The Museum is in There, In That Order in No Hierarchy
of the Order (fig. 21).
While Johanson’s work ruminated on the synergy between nature and humanity
in the city’s most famous park, Rigo 23 took the opportunity to expose his political and
activist leanings in his project Tate Wiki Kuwa Museum, transforming the museum into a
fictitious institution dedicated to showing the work of imprisoned American Indian leader
Leonard Peltier, who many—Rigo 23 included—believed to be wrongly imprisoned.
Painting an outdoor section of the building a deep turquoise blue, Rigo 23 turned the
large exterior wall into the façade of the fictitious museum, hanging banners—designed
in his signature graphic, stripped-down style—on the structural supports propping up the
earthquake damaged de Young. The banners announced a display of Peltier’s paintings
inside the building, which were housed inside of a cell-sized gallery, a space usually
reserved as an office and lounge for the museums security guards. According to the
Museum Pieces catalogue,
Rigo 99 is interested in bringing social context to art production, and here he
takes a finished work of art and infuses it with a particular social context—
something that happens when any work enters a museum display. Peltier’s
paintings might seem like normal works of art, but his prisoner number is
marked on the back of the painting, an imposing institutional signature. Placed
inside a museum, these works take on vastly different meaning. Rigo 99’s
interest is in trying to “open a channel for dialogue” between two very disparate
entities.
107

In the same month, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (at the time known as “The Center
for the Arts”) opened Bay Area Now 2, a sequel to the first Bay Area Now: A Regional

107
Glen Helfand, Museum Pieces: Bay Area Artists Consider the De Young (San Francisco: Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco, 1999), 21. Prior to settling on Rigo 23, Rigo—whose birth name is Ricardo
Gouveia—would change the number behind the name annually to reflect the current year.
60

Survey of Contemporary Art held in the summer of 1997. Organized by Chief Curator
Renny Pritikin, Visual Arts Curator Rene de Guzman, and Associate Visual Arts Curator
Arnold Kemp, Bay Area Now 2 billed itself as an inclusive survey of artistic production
in the Bay Area, a claim virtually impossible to honor given the broad diversity of artistic
practices in the Bay Area. What both the 1997 and 1999 installments of Bay Area Now
had in common, however, was that many of the artists featured in the exhibitions were
already fixtures in the Mission’s circuit of established nonprofit gallery spaces such as
New Langton Arts and Southern Exposure, and newer alternative, for-profit spaces such
as scene/escena, ESP, and Four Walls. Mission School artists Margaret Kilgallen, Barry
McGee, Rigo 23, Chris Johanson, and Scott Hewicker, for example, were fixtures in
these small neighborhood galleries prior to their inclusion in the first Bay Area Now, a
fact that did not go unnoticed by local art critics like David Bonetti who, in his review of
the first Bay Area Now in 1997, noted that the inclusion of so many new, emerging artists
suggested that YBCA curators Pritikin, de Guzman, and Kemp had been busy visiting
studios and galleries “off the beaten track.”
108

One such gallery “off the beaten track” that SFMOMA and YBCA curators made
the rounds to was Julie Deamer’s Four Walls. After an internship at Southern Exposure
under director John Winet that exposed her to a nexus of boundary-pushing artists that
included Nayland Blake, Jerome Caja, Scott Hewicker, Cliff Hengst, and Kevin Killian,
as well as experimental alternative spaces like Kiki Gallery, Victoria Room, Push, and

108
David Bonetti, "The Young at Art: "Bay Area Now" Multimedia Exhibit at Yerba Buena Is Best Survey
of Local Talent in Years," San Francisco Examiner, June 18, 1997, accessed September 5, 2011,
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/e/a/1997/06/18/STYLE4721.dtl.
61

Refusalon, Deamer began the search for a gallery space to call her own. In the spring of
1995, Deamer noticed a “For Lease” sign in the second-story window of an old firehouse
building above the Mission dive bar Kilowatt. The Victorian building at the corner of
Albion Alley and 16
th
Street was owned by a former employer of Deamers with whom
she had a good rapport, and within a matter of weeks, she found herself scrubbing the
hardwood floors and painting the walls of the space that would become Four Walls.
The primary impetus for Deamer opening the gallery was simple—to offer artists
whose work excited her a space to take over and make their own. More than that, it was
Deamers hope that the artists she invited into the gallery would take its physical
attributes—the double hung windows, prominent grid of ceiling beams, seven-foot high
wainscot, and other architectural details—as a point of departure to create works that
were site-specific and installation based—and that they did. For Lashes (1996) in his solo
exhibition Lullaby (1996), for example, Robert Ortbal installed curtains made of
unspooled cassette tapes over the gallery’s wall of windows, leaving each window
slightly open so that with each breeze the electromagnetic tendrils would tickle the light
that filtered into the space (fig. 22). Jessica Snow and Chris Johanson also produced
installations that took the physical attributes of the gallery space into consideration;
however, they seemed to also internalize the charged atmosphere outside of the gallery
walls.
Described by Deamer as a “macroscopic relief that converted the gallery space
into a giant hard drive,” Jessica Snow’s installation Eccentricity of the Middle Ground
62

(1999) was a complex pattern comprised of pastel colors and craft materials.
109
A soft-
hued palette of pink and blue shapes were painted directly onto the gallery’s wall and
ceiling, with paper and ribbons pasted atop, threads strung around pins, faint passages of
drawing interspersed, and circular shapes—evocative of psychedelic champagne
bubbles—randomly clustered throughout, lending the installation a comic energy. The
installation, when taken as a whole, was a schematic of a circuit board tucked away into a
computer’s hard drive, an overt reference to the technology upon which the booming e-
economy was being built (fig. 23).
Chris Johanson’s installation of paintings and drawings at Four Walls titled All on
Different Trips (1998) marked a perceivable shift into work that was markedly more
installation based. Leaving the macro-city landscapes of former works like those we saw
in Clarion Alley, Johanson instead zeroed in on the “people walkers”—the anonymous
figures who wander with heads bent downward through fictitious city streets—that
commonly populated his earlier drawings. The fitfully scribbled text above each figures
head revealed an assiduously chosen fragment of personality, from the bridge-burner—
“you know those people who think it's OK to fuck people over and over”—to the
mountain walker—“symbolic of the daily climbing that we all do”—to the hurried,
stressed-out wage earner.
110

Clockfaces painted in thick, black paint occupied scraps of wood stained a deep
sunshine-yellow and lined up to form a makeshift wall which was then propped up at eye

109
Julie Deamer, interview by author, November 1, 2011.

110
Marcy Freedman, “First Thursday Report,” accessed February 27, 2012,
http://www.sfweekly.com/1998-09-02/calendar/first-thursday-report/.
63

level on temporary, handmade pedestals (fig. 24). As one walked into the gallery space,
the clocks were the first thing to meet your eye, each running a blur of hands—like
spokes of a wagon wheel—that moved so quickly, time fell away into obfuscatory
overdrive. Working with black and simple pastel shades of house paint on found wood,
scraps of butcher paper, construction paper, envelopes, and cardboard, Johanson stayed
as close to “the people” as he could while converting the gallery into an atmospheric
cityscape comprised of buildings—which critic Kenneth Baker astutely compared to
those in George Grosz’s early work
111
—lined with windows that each provided a
snapshot into the bittersweet lives of their dwellers.
Running parallel to the gallery’s wainscoting was a makeshift frieze constructed
out of a series of drawings of Johanson’s “walkers,” each striding through the installation
to a destination unknown—or perhaps to no destination at all. Many of the drawings
mounted on the walls were portraits layered with words that ranged from the cheerful—“I
can make anything happen”—to the self-loathing and downtrodden. One paper sheet was
crowded with word balloons filled with phrases that what one might say to some one
living on the streets: “Poor soul,” “Look man I worked all day, what did you do?,” “Get a
job, motherfucker.” Suspended from the ceiling in the center of the room the supine
figure of Negatron—heavily painted on a flat piece of timber—presided over the
installation. No longer in the gutter, he floated in the sky above, gaze fixed upward as if
looking beyond the clouds and into the expansive universe beyond.

111
Kenneth Baker, “Jarring Street Scenes in Johanson's ‘Trips’: Moody Works Include Written, Drawn
Words,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 10, 1998, E-1 sec., accessed February 19, 2012,
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1998/09/10/DD10525.DTL.
64

The cacophonous installation of words and images was accompanied by a sound
piece wholly comprised of remixed Grateful Dead songs, created by playing two vinyl
records contemporaneously and through the utilization of a variety of effects pedals, bass
amps, and mixing boards supplied by Johanson. The mix was slowed down and spiked
with feedback, culminating in a playlist made up of bizarre renditions of songs that in
their original form would have represented the ideologies of zealous fans.
112
A solitary
microphone stood in the corner of the room, poised to capture the ambient noise of the
space and the mutterings of gallery goers, sounds that were then continually subsumed
into the mix. Johanson’s sound piece, according to Deamer, “captured the polar-opposite
moods that you can have at a Dead concert––good times or bad times, a great trip or a
really horrible trip––and certainly served as a perfect soundtrack to the exhibition’s dense
social commentary.”
113
All on Different Trips (1998) managed to capture the collective
mental climate of the Mission during a time of acute social and economic tension, while
also connecting to a transcendental sense of mysticism or spirituality which could
perhaps offer a little bit of respite from the chaotic tribulations of those struggling to get
by.
Within a month of his solo show at Four Walls, Johanson and the “Mission
district art underground” took over the Lanai Motel on Lombard Street for SAP—the
residue of the San Francisco art scene. Organized by Julie Deamer of Four Walls and
Jim Schatz of scene/escena, SAP was conceived as an alternative to the high-profile,

112
Julie Deamer, Chris Johanson: May 1, 2001 - July 29, 2001 (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2001),
accessed February 27, 2012, http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/detail/exhibition_id/27.

113
Ibid.

65

high-art San Francisco International Art Expo, the first iteration of which was scheduled
to take place in close proximity to Lanai Motel at Fort Mason in the high-end Marina
neighborhood. For Deamer and Schatz, the title SAP worked as a metaphor for the
dynamic, amorphous organism that was the San Francisco art scene. SAP took over the
kitschy, 1960s Hawaiian-themed Lanai Motel and filled its 25 rooms with the work of 28
local artists who were encouraged to create site-specific installations that played off of
the rooms’ impoverished modernist aesthetic. The parking lot of the motel, meanwhile,
played host to twelve bands and a series of live performances. SAP was styled to be
exciting, free, community-oriented and participatory—a reflection of the scene it
represented.
114
The ultimate goal, however—as evidenced by the free shuttle that ran
between SAP and the Expo—was to expose the Expo’s crowd to San Francisco’s “real”
art community, and showcase artists who would have otherwise been overlooked by blue-
chip art sellers and seekers.
115

Chris Johanson’s room in the motel reflected “the flipside of San Francisco” that
Schatz and Deamer endeavored to show.
116
As if a desperate drug addict had locked
himself in the room for weeklong bender, Johanson turned the room upside down,
covering every available surface with erratically scratched drawings on tattered, multi-

114
Christine Brenneman, “SAP, the Alternative Art Fair, Hits the Big Time,” MetroActive Arts, September
21, 98, section goes here, accessed February 27, 2012,
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sfmetro/09.21.98/artfair-9836.html.

115
Deamer, Julie. Interview by author. November 1, 2011.

116
“This fair is going to have a strong Mission presence. This is the flipside of San Francisco that we love.
We enjoy the filth and dirt of the Mission. Our reality is not Pacific Heights.” Jim Schatz as quoted in
Christine Brenneman’s “SAP, the Alternative Art Fair, Hits the Big Time,” MetroActive Arts, September
21, 98, section goes here, accessed February 27, 2012,
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sfmetro/09.21.98/artfair-9836.html
66

colored paper that reflected the psychotic state of the room’s inhabitant—a figure curled
up in a puddle of his own urine; shopping carts and trash cans; frenetic, smudged-out
depictions of monster-like faces proclaiming “I really need to get high”; a knife in the
back of a slumped over “walker.” Amidst the cobbled-together scenes of disillusionment
and despair, under the glow of the cheap motel lamp that protrudes from the wall, an
abstract starburst, or “energy explosion”—a gestural preoccupation in many of
Johanson’s subsequent works—is drawn in gold marker on sage-green paper. A moment
of reprieve within the abject chaos, the simple drawing hangs from the laminate paneled
wall, as if reminding us to look at the stars from the gutters in which we all lay.
67

Epilogue

In July of 2000—less than two years after SAP, and one year after Bonetti’s article
proclaiming San Francisco’s triumphant arrival onto the international art scene, Glen
Helfand penned an article titled, “Wrath of the Dot-Com: Chronicle of Local Art Scene
Ponders Loss, Options.” In it he writes:
Because I’ve been a member of the San Francisco alternative art scene for over a
decade, I’ve seen the shift from funky to digital-slick first hand. And I must
admit, I’ve generally found being at the ground zero of that evolution an
exciting place to be. Sure I’ve noted peripherally that some artists were leaving
because of it, but watching the change and engaging in cultural criticism at the
source seemed irrelevant. I was so seduced by high-tech’s promise of creating
more artistic and social possibilities—through elaborate tools or by funneling
stock market millions into the local art scene—that I didn’t notice that the exact
opposite was happening.
117

It is during an art opening for the exhibition Prettytown at ESP, a storefront gallery on
Valencia Street, that Helfand comes to the sudden realization that the art scene that was
thriving just a year prior, was deflating at an alarming rate. Many of those leaving town
were doing so out of a lack of any other option, having been served with eviction notices
and faced with the reality of not being able to afford an alternate place to live within city
limits. Others, like ESP’s owner/director Matt Pawlowski, simply felt it was time to
leave—he was burned out, and ready to move on.
The feeling of loss expressed by Helfand, however, discloses the idealistic hope
that a thriving art scene has the ability to sustain itself without expanding outward. The

117
Glen Helfand, "Wrath of the Dot-Com: Chronicler of Local Art Scene Ponders Loss, Options," SFGate:
Home of the San Francisco Chronicle, July 27, 2000, accessed February 28, 2012,
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2000/07/27/dotcom.DTL&ao=all.
68

dot-com boom, for all its stresses, had succeeded in both galvanizing and energizing the
arts community in the Mission, and fortifying many of the community art institutions that
had managed to weather the storm. That is not to say, however, that the dot-com boom
didn’t force artists and art spaces to either grow-up and/or get out.
118
San Francisco’s dot-
com bubble had burst by 2001, but by that time, Julie Deamer and Matt Pawlowski had
both moved to Los Angeles, where Darin Klein would also end up settling after a short
stint in Berlin. Yet, when asked why they made the choice to leave when they did, their
answer was simple—it was time for something new. It wasn’t long after the departure of
such figures—who were pivotal in the Mission’s 1990s art scene—and Helfand’s article
lamenting the loss of “artists and freethinking weirdos” from the art scene, that many of
the Mission School artists would be propelled full force onto the international scene.
119

In 2002, Larry Rinder—former director of the CCA Wattis Institute for
Contemporary Arts, and Assistant Director and Curator for Twentieth-Century Art at the
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive—served as the Whitney Biennial’s chief
curator, and had “not forgotten his old friends” when selecting the artists to be
included.
120
Rinder’s selections provided a cross-section of artistic production in the Bay
Area, ranging from media artists Ken Feingold and Jim Campbell to African American
quilt maker Rosie Lee Tompkins to monochrome painter John Zurier. Chris Johanson and
Margaret Kilgallen, who had passed away of breast cancer in 2001 at the age of 34, were

118
Glen Helfand, “Wrath of the Dot-Com: Chronicler of Local Art Scene Ponders Loss, Options.”

119
Ibid.

120
David Bonetti, “Whitney Gives Bay Area Its Due,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 27, 2001, D-1
sec.
69

also included in the Biennial, selected out of “the liveliest group of artists in town” to
champion the “Mission aesthetic” that was “urban, gritty, graffiti-derived, [and] punkish
with a sharp political sense and a good sense of humor.”
121

Johanson was given the choice between two spaces in the Whitney Museum of
American Art in which to construct his biennial installation—a traditional gallery space,
or the museum’s four-story stairwell. Choosing the latter, Johanson gathered a group of
friends from San Francisco, and worked with the Whitney installation staff to convert
Marcel Breuer's great staircase into the rickety, cartoon-like sculptural installation, This is
a Picture about the place we live in called Earth that is inside a place we call Space
(2002). Beginning on the bottom level, a bleak subterranean world occupied by two
dejected cut-out figures on a miniature stairway, the piece climbed floor to floor, through
a haphazard cityscape bisected by swarming freeways and overpasses constructed out of
found 2 x 4s, and ending in the brightly-colored utopian climax of outerspace (fig. 26).
Recumbent figures dangled from the ceiling, no longer floating in the sky, as in
All on Different Trips (1998), but suspended in a galaxy of planets with names such as
“plants and animals,” “soothing energy,” “cold,” “grey area,” and “anger.” In the middle
of the schematic cosmos a large canary-yellow “SUN” is emblazoned with text that
seems to speak to the Mission community Johanson soon would be pulled away from as
he is propelled further into the international art world circuitry: “the main reason why far
away yet very very close to us all the time the light the spirit whose warmth is always
with you.”

121
Bonetti, “Whitney Gives Bay Area Its Due.”
70

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82

Appendix: Images

Figure 1. Cover of San Francisco Bay Guardian, by Chris Johanson, 2002.

83

Figure 2. Chris Johanson, Untitled, circa 1998.
Clarion Alley, San Francisco.

Figure 3: Chris Johanson, Untitled, 1998. Detail.
Clarion Alley, San Francisco.

84

Figure 4. Twist (Barry McGee), Untitled, 1993.
Clarion Alley, San Francisco.

Figure 5. Tags by Barry McGee (“Twist) and Chris Johanson, date unknown.
Bathroom wall in Mission District bar.
85

Figure 6. Chris Johanson, tag of Negatron (bottom left hand corner), date unknown.
Delivery truck, San Francisco

Figure 7. Rigo 23, Innercity Home, 1995.
86

Figure 8. Scott Hewicker and Cliff Hengst, covers for Mission Men zine series, 1993-
1998.
Left to right: Mission Cops, 1993; Mission Mechanics, 1997; Irish Movers,1998.

Figure 9. Scott Hewicker and Cliff Hengst, interior pages of Mission Cops, 1993.
87

Figure 10. Chris Johanson, album cover for “Pop Songs For Our Friends” by Tina Age
13, 1994.

Figure 11. Chris Johanson, cover for the Turd Filled Donut (Issue 4), 1998.
88

Figure 12. San Francisco Print Collective, “Come Enjoy the Mission: Cleaner, Brighter,
Whiter Tablecloths” poster, 2000.

Figure 13. Mission Yuppie Eradication Project poster, 1998.
89

Figure 14. Seismic Solution, selection of posters, 1998.

Figure 15. Together We Can Defeat Capitalism, Capitalism-Stops at Nothing, 1997.
90

Figure 16. Together We Can Defeat Capitalism, IT’S NOT THE CHEESE—IT’S THE
GREED, 2000.

Figure 17. Together We Can Defeat Capitalism, NO OVER-TAKING—OF ART BY BIG
BUSINESS, 2000.

91

Figure 17. Megan Wilson, Better Homes and Gardens, 2000.

Figure 18. Albert Lujan, eVicted, for the Digital Billboard Project, Galería de la Raza,
2000.

92

Figure 19. Los Über-Locos, Ese, The Last Mexican in the Mission, for the Digital
Billboard Project, Galería de la Raza, 2000.

Figure 20. Chris Johanson, Untitled, 1999. Drawing included in the installation The Art
for the People the Animals and Plants in no Hierarchy of Importance Order, The
Museum is in There, In That Order in No Hierarchy of the Order. Image from Museum
Pieces (1999) catalogue.
93

Figure 21. Robert Ortbal, Lashes, 1996.
Part of Lullaby exhibition, Four Walls, San Francisco, CA.

Figure 22. Installation view. Jessica Snow, Eccentricity of the Middle Ground, 1999.
Four Walls, San Francisco, CA.

94

Figure 23. Installation view. Chris Johanson, All on Different Trips, 1998.
Four Walls, San Francisco, CA.

Figure 24. Installation view. Chris Johanson, Lanai Motel Room, 1998.
95

SAP—the residue of the San Francisco art scene, San Francisco, CA.

Figure 25. Installation views. Chris Johanson, This is a Picture about the place we live in
called Earth that is inside a place we call Space, 2002.
Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

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Asset Metadata

Creator von Treskow, Jacqueline Ann (author)

Core Title All on different trips: San Francisco's Mission School and the dot-com years

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 05/04/2012

Defense Date 03/26/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1990s,Barry McGee,Chris Johanson,creative resistance,dot-com boom,gentrification,Margaret Kilgallen,Mission school,OAI-PMH Harvest,Rigo 23,San Francisco

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Higa, Karin (committee chair), Helfand, Glen (committee member), Moss, Karen (committee member)

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