For almost 20 years, I have wandered down the Mission District's Clarion Alley (Clarion Alley Mural Project's (CAMP) new website), snapping photos of any stencils that I haven't snapped already. Back in the 1990s, Scott Williams's amazing mural of Californian animals was the main stencil presence in the one-block alley. Other stencils never really showed up there, and Williams's panel was the defining style in the City. Back then, Clarion Alley didn't have much in the way of art, tags, etc. that surrounded the amazing murals. The pavement wasn't painted either. It was a clean-looking street that happened to have large panels of art. I still walked down all the time, staying on the hunt for new stencils.
As the 2000s began, public art developed into new forms, ideas, styles, and attitudes. This was before Banksy blew up, before the terms "street art" and "Mission School" were used. Murals weren't being documented by digital cameras and put on social media sites for the world to see. Social media wasn't a term, and barely a platform that could support photographs. Before the Internet blew up, CAMP kept painting walls in the Mission, even outside their namesake street. They had been since 1992, and, as the world connected on the Internet, the world began to discover CAMP.
Back in 2000, the first Dot Com Boom was being felt hard in the Mission District. Just like today, poor folks and artists were being displaced. Artists organized, calling the many events, happenings and projects "Art Strikes Back." I had only made a few stencils by then, but cut three anti-gentrification images for ASB. I submitted a time and place to paint them, and chose Clarion Alley's street for a canvas. I didn't have much experience with spray paint, so my project didn't go over too well. A camera crew documenting my painting showed up, but I gave them a bad performance. I went on to spread the images around (and learn more about can control), but I mention it now because of the location I selected.
Clarion has always been an inspiration for me. The murals there have always been different than the other older locations in the Mission. Edgy. Punk. Funny. To me, the early CAMP murals defined what eventually became street art style. And once street art became an art wave around 2002, Clarion Alley became a different type of experience. Travel guides noticed. Traveling artists noticed. Stickers, taggers, and tourists noticed. And stencils began popping up there all the time. I documented so many stencils in Clarion, I gave them their own archive.
And now CAMP has their amazing archives up on the web to share and celebrate. I submitted most of my photos to CAMP for their website. There are about 160 stencil photographs on there. After all these years, it was the least I could do.