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Shawn Bullen
They've become two of San Francisco's most prominent black faces, seen every day by thousands of commuters who pass by the corner of Fillmore and Geary. Shawn Bullen's artful profiles of John Lee Hooker, who died in 2001 at 83, and Genevieve McDevitt-Mauldin, a young singer in the funk band Katdelic, say everything about Bullen's approach to street art, and the way he reaches into the neighborhoods he paints in for inspiration.
McDevitt-Mauldin grew up in the Fillmore, which for much of the 20th century was the heart of black San Francisco. She and Katdelic regularly perform at the Boom Boom Room, whose wall Burrell was invited to paint. McDevitt-Mauldin is a local girl who's starting to make it in her field of choice. Fillmore residents appreciate (and applaud) Bullen's depiction of the neighborhood kid who they used to babysit and whose visage is now the size of Mount Rushmore. Hooker co-founded the Boom Boom Room, which is named after one of his songs.
Bullen's street-art habit: experience a neighborhood and talk to its people before painting, rather than parachute in and impose a planned vision.
"I try to illustrate what a community has been but also what it could be," says Bullen, who studied fine art and photography in college. "When I started walking around and [telling] people that I was doing a mural for the Boom Boom Room, people who'd lived there a while were concerned that the history of the neighborhood was being forgotten. And it was important that anything new honor the history. Katdelic performs there once a month, and Genevieve is a new singer who's just getting her name out there. It would be awesome if my art could help progress somebody else's artistic career."
In Noe Valley, American Express commissioned Bullen to paint a two-story street work that tells the story of that area's small businesses, and like his Boom Boom painting, the work is an inspired, larger-than-life look at people who ordinarily get little attention on public art. The biggest image in that collage: a young woman who worked in the area and told Bullen she hopes to return to China with her mom to visit family. The plane at the top is a proxy for her dreams of traveling.
Bullen, 26, is a Chicago native who lives in the Richmond District and spent many months living in the Bayview, where he's orchestrated several standout street works, and where he's co-founding an urban arts festival in October that will bring top muralists and street artists to paint walls and work with neighborhood schoolkids. He's already taught mural painting to middle school kids there. The festival would happen over three days. Among the fiscal sponsors: the nonprofit SF Beautiful, Bayview activist Tyra Fennell, and Bullen himself.
"We're going to bring artists from outside San Francisco, and local artists from San Francisco and the Bay Area, and create a mural installation on one entire block in the industrial district of Bayview," says Bullen. "We're trying to create a project that benefits the surrounding community, and the artists.
"We want to bring a larger culture of mural painting and street art to the city," he adds. "It's surprising that it doesn't already exist here, since [a similar festival] is happening in every other major city. It's exciting that we get the opportunity to get it started."
Amandalynn
Street art and graffiti are inextricably linked, with casual observers frequently conflating the two. Graffiti is based on stylized lettering, and its presumed Latin cognate, graphire, means "to write." Graffiti writers were Amandalynn's first peer group when she started doing street art in San Francisco. But she didn't want to do tagging and writing, so she focused on doing images, and she painted what she knew best: women. That's still Amandalynn's preferred motif, and she's the most prominent female street artist doing those images in San Francisco.
One of Amandalynn's most recent works, called Live Outside (700 Stevenson St. at Eighth), turned a hotel's boring beige wall into a sea of turquoise, where three dark-haired women frolic in the water, one of them blowing at dandelions. Birds fly amid giant lettering done by the Oakland artist Lady Mags, with whom Amandalynn has collaborated since 2011. Amandalynn's street art can be thought of as beautification art. The women she paints, though, are more than eye candy.
"I started out as an artist with the dream of being a muralist," says Amandalynn, 35, whose freelance work includes outdoor sculpture preservation and motorcycle painting. "I grew up in Pennsylvania, till I was 18, and moved out here. I did a little bit of it there, but it wasn't until I came to San Francisco that I met a bunch of graffiti writers and learned how to paint on walls just for the hell of it, and how fun and inspiring it can be. I'd show up and the guys would start painting, and I would just fit in something somewhere."
Amandalynn had a specific vision for what she wanted to do. "As much as I was inspired by them and their style, I really had this desire to do my own thing, and create my fine art on walls," she says. "I love abstract art, but I'm not a good abstract artist. And I love graffiti, but I'm not a graffiti artist. Women inspire me. Female energy, and nature, and that sort of thing. When I look around and dream of things, that's what entices me, so that's what I put out there.
"I've been challenged several times to paint men, and they end up looking quite feminine," she adds. "It's obviously something that's not inside of me."
When Amandalynn started doing street art about 15 years ago, there were fewer women doing it, and few other artists putting women so prominently — using brushes, and completing gallery-like paintings — on public San Francisco walls. "I was incredibly fortunate to get engulfed with a group of graffiti writers who really encouraged me to do that sort of thing," Amandalynn says. "It wasn't widely accepted. No one came to a wall with brushes. Now, there are street-art TV shows, and everyone is now painting for murals, and they want you to paint girls. It's definitely something that's worked its way in through various artists. I can't say I was the first in any way. But it's embraced much more nowadays, simply because there's more a fine-art approach to murals."
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