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Cameron Moberg
In the Oxygen cable-television series Street Art Throwdown, the first reality TV show to feature street artists, Cameron Moberg is the only contestant who's a San Francisco native and resident — but he defies the stereotypes of the city. The first time audiences see Moberg on the show, in episode 1, he's painting a cross on a metal shutter. Moberg is a Christian pastor who infuses his street art with symbols — both overt and implied — of religious inspiration. That doesn't make Moberg's art "religious art." Instead, his works are akin to secular gospel music — enjoyable in any way that inspires the audience.
A good example: his work Time Flies When You're Having Fun, at 3166 26th St. (near Folsom), which covers the outside of a three-story building and features a trippy kaleidoscope of shapes and colors, topped by a giant majestic bird that's swooping along. Moberg did the work with Ivan "Gath" Preciado, who's also on Street Art Throwdown.
"My faith is completely encompassed with my life," says Moberg, 33, who also goes by the name Camer1. "So say I paint the birds that I paint, and there's not a giant scripture up there, but to me creation comes from God. So when I paint that bird, it's something that I would call natural revelation — God revealing himself through nature. My desire is to love people and reflect the love of Christ."
Moberg grew up in the Mission, near Army and Guerrero, and studied religion at Oakland's Patten University, then a religious-based institution. He's a self-taught artist who favors baseball hats, tattoos, ear and lip piercings, and a style he says is rooted in graffiti but is venturing into character work. So his birds frequently have letter-like shapes descending from their feathers.
With a wife and two children, Moberg lives in low-income housing South of Market. Though he'd like to win the main prize of $100,000 on Street Art Throwdown, it's basic street art that drives his daily life. Painting and exhibiting in galleries don't have the same thrill.
"When you're out in the public, there are more interactions with the environment that you're in," says Moberg, whose appearance on Street Art Throwdown parallels his increasing visibility through street art and gallery exhibitions. "I'd even say it's sometimes performance art, even though we're not dancing or things like that. People get interested in the process. There's also the large space — there's just a lot more in the process that feels good when you're doing it.
"In front of a canvas, you're only kind of moving your arm and a little bit of your wrist," he explains. "But when you're on a wall, you're moving your entire body. You're doing lunges and really large movements. So it's not always the outcome that's important to us. There are movements with the can that feel good because they're so big and loose. I grew up in the hip-hop scene, and I love breakdancing. And everybody in hip-hop watched kung-fu movies. So coming into the street-art world, there's that side where you're climbing buildings and doing crazy stuff. It's fun coupling the physicality and the painting."
Few other pastors, it's fair to say, can say the same thing.
Ricardo Richey (Apex)
Whether it's the Tenderloin (Ellis and Leavenworth), Mid-Market (corner of Turk), or an off-the-beaten-path part of San Francisco (Colton Street and Colusa Place), Apex's work stands out for three good reasons: 1. It's architectural, with layers and lines and loops that zig and zag and form exquisite patterns; 2. It's colorful, and even when Apex uses a central color, he employs half-shades and quarter-shades that create striking contrasts; 3. It's unlike any other street art in San Francisco.
A native San Franciscan, 36-year-old Apex has done street art most of his life — since 14. Raised in the outer Sunset District and Anza Vista, and now a resident of the Mission District, Apex has used different San Francisco neighborhoods — including its buildings and billboards — to inspire his art. Architecture is one component of Apex's artistic foundation, but just one. Lettering is another big influence, though that, too, is subsumed by Apex's unique aesthetic.
"To be honest, as far back as third grade, I was driven with abstraction and color gradations," says Apex, who studied graphic design in college. "I really give credit to the San Francisco I grew up in. The grittiness of the '80s and early '90s of certain areas of the city. The Victorians on McAllister and upper Fillmore — those color schemes — to the box houses of the Sunset. For me, just driving through the city and seeing different architecture and buildings, seeing paper billboards that were ripped because of the rain, that to me was art."
Apex has exhibited at galleries and museums around the Bay Area, including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and his honors include an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Last December, Adobe commissioned him to do a large public "pop-up" mural in Hayes Valley that has since been donated to the African American Art & Culture Complex on Fulton Street.
His studio is near Turk and Market. "I use my studio to practice and my public art to talk to one another and inform one another," Apex says. "It's beneficial for me as an artist to have public work that people can respond to, and get feedback from, and then have studio practice that I use to experiment and have a more intimate setting to view the work. It's a cycle I use to slowly change the public art, and then I turn around and slowly change my studio work.
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