Most of San Francisco's best art never makes it into a museum. It's on a roll-up door, a garage, a wall of wooden planks, the side of a building. It gets painted over, tagged, restored, painted again. If you don't photograph it, it's gone.
These are a few walls we stopped for while walking the city's alleys. A vintage car in spray paint. A lion hanging from a tree. A woman in profile against geometric mountains. Red-and-white mushrooms under green trees. Block letters on steel that only make sense from across the street. And a sign that says what a lot of people around here feel: Born & Raised Mission.
It reads like the city talking to itself. It's also where a lot of our design thinking starts. Several shirts in our Murals collection come straight out of this tradition of painted walls and roll-down gates.
If you want to see more in person, start in the Mission, where Clarion Alley and Balmy Alley have been repainted by local artists for decades.
