who’s wall? our wall! well actually …..
Town hall meeting at Southern Exposure Gallery
A relatively un-rainy, yet bone chilling, Wednesday evening this week Southern Exposure hosted a trickling crowd of mission denizens to discuss a store front sized western wall on 1240 Valencia between past 23rd. This wall as pictured below, has been the home to a decade of wheat pastings ranging from political and social commentary to advertisements for San Francisco underground music and arts. The quality spans the spectrum from hand scrawled nonsense to archival posters from the mission print shop and local artist hand crafted originals. A ten year archive has been put online titled : de- appropriation projects.
What many artists and Mission district pedestrians did not know was that this is not merely an unkempt relatively ‘free for use’ wall as a result of negligent or lazy property owners, this wall is owned and in as loose as this term can be stretched, curated, by an architect, designer artist Bruce Tombs who owns the building. Tombs lead the town hall meeting with calm eloquence. He decided one decade ago to stop fighting the graffiti on the wall and with a ‘ if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em’ attitude became the a custodian instead of police of his wall. He was not fond of the tangle of graffiti tags and painted a checkerboard pattern atop his wall to break up the space. Immediately this grid drew the attention of wheat pastings. The building had previosuly been the wall of the Mission Police station holding cells.
The meeting was everything to love and loathe about the artsy liberal bubble/bastion of San Francisco. The crowd was comprised of artists and neighbors of the wall, self selected by those who cared to spend an evening in discussion of space, art and ideas. One self satisfied crowd member clad in black quoting Frankfurt school philosophy proposed that the wall may deter artists from making’ true revolutionary’ work if there was this space allocated for them to express themselves freely. Other crowd members quickly squelched the idea that there is any finite amount of radical art to be created in SF. A long time neighbor, twenty years in residence, donning an exceptional cacophony of colors in his neon wind breaker, red velour pants and spring loaded tennis shoes, praised the anarchistic nature of the wall. The randomness, anonymity and ephemeral nature of the work is an awesome force in the accelerated change of this up and coming neighborhood once home to artists and Mexican immigrants.
bruce tombs (the most awesome)
town hall crowd in SOEX wrapt & deep in contemplation
Public space and public art rarely achieve the absolute freedom and forum for communication of ideas and images that this privately owned space, archived and maintained by Bruce Tombs, has achieved. It is a privately owned public art wall. Tombs is held responsible by the city for the edges of the wall, making sure that the graffiti does not leak on to other corners of other walls. The city has largely let this space thrive in its own right but has occasionally sited Tombs, this coincided, coincidentally, with especially negative Willie Brown posters, which had his classic mischievous grin and above his head stated ” f&^% the homeless” and below stated ” save the tourists”. Ha!
The room was certainly a choir to the benevolent preaching modest Tombs, however other than the Frankfurt school scholar a young conscientious woman brought up the neighborhood gentrification but it was unclear how to stick this, figuratively, to the wall. It would be difficult to discern whether or not the Latino population appreciate, care, hate or ambivalence to the wall. The mission is home to a richness of murals made largely by Latino residents of the area, a different form but comparable public expression of local flavor. Bruce Tombs is my hero of the week, hats off! (and big ups to soex always stretching the role of gallery.)
