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The bears that began appearing on walls along Market Street and the Tenderloin over the last decade didn't start out as bears. They were blobs. Abstract blobs that came from Chad Hasegawa's imagination and would have stayed as blobs except for one thing: Hasegawa's friends urged him to anthropomorphize the shapes, and Hasegawa agreed. The bear was a compromise of sorts, but it stuck. And so did the style: a cross between abstraction and figuration. From a close distance, Hasegawa's bears still look like overlapping shapes without a definitive structure.
Cheap paint helped prompt the figures.
"I was getting these bucket paints for $1," Hasegawa says. "I was having fun with dripping and splashing. I was putting ridiculous amounts of paint on. All bright colors. They also had neutral tones. And my friends would hang out and watch me paint. They'd say, 'Dude, you're painting a bear.' And I'd say, 'No, it's actually a blob.' And they'd go, 'No, dude — it's a bear. You can tell. It's all brown.'
"I refused to paint a bear, and finally my friend was like, 'Just paint a bear and see what happens.' So I painted a bear, and said, 'Oh, my God. This is kind of cool.' It made sense now that I was painting in this ugly style. It opened up everything. And I said, 'I need to get this out onto the street.' "
Hasegawa, 32, grew up in Hawaii with strong artistic ambitions. Even as a 10-year-old, he devoured graffiti magazines. The street artist who influenced Hasegawa at that age was Barry McGee, who went by "Twist" and other names. But it was the entire Mission School scene that inspired Hasegawa to apply to San Francisco's Academy of Art University, where he earned a BFA in advertising. Hasegawa has been here ever since. From the day he arrived in 2000 and moved to Nob Hill, Hasegawa began putting up street art.
"As soon as I got here, the first thing I did was walk down Taylor Street to Market Street. I was hungry and I needed a refrigerator, and I walked to the pawnshop on Sixth Street, and the first thing I saw was Twist's character," Hasegawa says. "Twist was in my face right there, on the Luggage Store Gallery. I thought, 'Whoa. This is San Francisco!'
"I walked into the gallery and I noticed the stairwell had a bunch of tags," he says. "And this lady is at the top of the stairwell and she says, 'Are you going to come up and see the art?' I said, 'No, no. I'm sorry.' And I ran away. I went back and saw her again, and I found it was Laurie Lazer, the co-founder of the Luggage Store, which the whole Mission School hung out at. It was just my luck."
That luck has stayed with Hasegawa, whose bears can be found on the outside shutter of White Walls Gallery, 886 Geary in the Tenderloin; at the Luggage Store Gallery's outdoor annex Tenderloin National Forest, at 509 Ellis; and on a wall near the intersection of Treat and 23rd streets in the outer Mission. The Mission helped inspire Hasegawa to come to San Francisco. Now, his work is situated there, a twist that "Twist" would surely be happy about.
Chris Gazaleh
The history of political art is the history of art itself, as in Francisco Goya's The Third of May 1808, whose firing-squad scene is a searing attack on the inhumanity of wars and governments. Chris Gazaleh has one foot in that art tradition, with a focus on Palestinian issues. In Clarion Alley, the celebrated art corridor between Mission and Valencia streets, Gazaleh has a large work of a man's face surrounded by squiggly lines. People who've studied languages might recognize it as stylized Arabic-lettering. Closer scrutiny reveals upsidedown pyramids in the man's eyes.
"My art is definitely that of a conscious person trying to address world politics," says Gazaleh. "I love putting history into my art. The Arabic is abstract. If you go to old mosques in Spain or Morocco, you see beautiful mosaics in Arabic letters. The face is wrapped in all these letters. The words are protecting the face but also causing confusion. The pyramids are like history that's reversed. The way we understand history is almost like the opposite of what we should. That art is like reinterpreting democracy and capitalism. A lot of Western ideas were adopted from Egyptians. Basically, it means that shit is backwards. We put a pyramid on the dollar bill, but I like to flip it upside down. I'm saying capitalism isn't working."
Last year, Gazaleh was one of the artists invited to contribute to the Oakland Palestine Solidarity Mural. His painting: a tree with multiple generations of Palestinians living within — symbolic of Palestinians' long history in the Middle East. At Clarion Alley, next to Gazaleh's art of the man and lettering, he painted a large work of a tree surrounded by a white wall that said, "Free the People of Palestine." That colorful artwork, which had been there for years, was painted over this month with another artist's work.
"The tree represents Palestine," says Gazaleh. "The Palestinian plight is known out here in major cities. And a lot of people know that Palestinians are a historic people. But there is also an extreme lack of understanding. It's not represented in education and the media. It's important to let our narrative be known."
Gazaleh's family immigrated from Palestine to San Francisco in 1955. His great-grandfather had a liquor store at 23rd and Guerrero. Gazaleh, 31, is a San Francisco native who also grew up in Dearborn, Mich., which has the highest concentration of Arab-Americans in the United States. As a college student at San Francisco State, Gazaleh was a lead organizer of the campus's Edward Said mural, which honors the late Palestinan-American author and academic. Gazaleh, who lives in the Excelsior District, studied postcolonial literature, not art.
"Art," Gazaleh says, "is the most important thing to get out there, because you can't censor art. The best thing I can do is use art for something that will open minds, and inspire, and criticize, and challenge. Those are things we need in society."
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