White Walls

For weeks I've been meaning to catch Frida Kahlo at the SFMOMA and this weekend was my last chance so a trip to the City was in order. I looked into getting tickets and, unsurprisingly, the show was sold out. Damn. Instead of kicking myself for being less than vigilant, I let Rob convince me into heading south anyway to check out the Shepard Fairey show at White Walls gallery in the Tenderloin. Shepard is the artist who created the Obama poster (see my previous post) and I was eager to see his work up close.

Being a Saturday, there was more traffic on the streets than our last several trips to SF and that was a headache. It took us considerably longer to navigate the streets and we almost got in a major collision on the way, but we finally made it. White Walls is on Larkin Street a few blocks east of Van Ness in a nondescript building with minimal signage but a vibrant streetside mural by Ron English and a Fairey piece hung behind the smudgy glass of a paneled window. It was clearly the place.


I expected to confront a bank of good-sized silkscreened posters of Fairey's work framed behind glass, the same that I'd previewed online. And indeed there was that. But my first impression was overhwhelmed by a huge piece, a larger version of this, hung prominently and flanked by others of lesser size but equal gravity on either side. I was really floored by the quality of these originals. Strong black stenciled work boldly laid over multi-layers of collaged graphic ephemera with textured varnished surfaces and richly nuanced color on canvas. No fussy glass. I love this stuff. A street art aesthetic giving way to tight graphics and, upon closer scrutiny, fine-grained delicate detail.

A possible cosmic reason for our delay en route to the gallery revealed itself when, upstairs amid multiple smaller works, I was startled by a young guy giving me an unexpected look of "Hey! Krista!" It took me more than a minute to grok that it was my own cousin, James, standing before me, who I hadn't seen in literally years. Strange and cool. He's a digital graphic artist himself and we had a catch up chat before heading out.

So, it was Fairey not Frida this time. No regrets.