A walk down San Francisco’s Clarion Alley – a narrow passageway connecting the Mission district’s two main thoroughfares whose walls are festooned with dozens of vibrant and political murals – is to enter a time machine into the liberal oasis’s more bohemian past. The public art project, now in its 28th year, has become a staple of walking tours of the one-time Latino neighborhood, a glimpse of the receding progressive soul of a rapidly gentrifying city.
But a rash of political vandalism has left the artists who maintain the alley feeling under attack.
“It really feels like hate crimes,” said Megan Wilson, an artist and the president of the board of the Clarion Alley Mural Project (Camp). “Every time we go to the alley, we are braced for what is going to be next.”
On Friday evening, red-paint wielding vandals left their mark on a number of murals in the alley. “Make America Great Again” hats – icons of Trumpism that are rarely seen in San Francisco – were painted all over a black and white mural featuring protesters with picket signs bearing decidedly anti-Trump slogans: “Families belong together”, “Abolish Ice”, and “Vote him out”.
Enjoying the @balmy_alley Block Party when I overheard someone talking about the vandalism overnight in Clarion Alley by a couple and their CHILD.
— Art by Amanda (@artbyamanda33) October 14, 2018
Went down there to see it for myself. Several murals were completely defaced.Tomorrow 2PM, come down to Clarion Alley and help clean pic.twitter.com/dxTfGlWjgI
A mural that read “Justice for Sahleem Tindle”, who was shot and killed by transit police in January, was defaced to read “Justice for Kavanaugh”. A third mural, which depicts the names of a number of black and Latino men killed by police over an inverted American flag – was tagged with the slogan “#FakeNews”.
The “Maga”-themed vandalism on Friday was followed on Saturday by what Wilson said was only the latest in a series of “Zionist attacks” against a series of pro-Palestinian murals that were set to be unveiled on Sunday.
The faces of Arab activists and leaders in one of the new murals, “Arab Liberation Mural”, were scribbled over with black paint. A mural by Wilson supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel (BDS) was also vandalized.
Clarion Alley has served as a community canvas since the 1990s. The murals have long reflected the culture and values of the neighborhood but have become even more pointedly political in the past decade, as rampant gentrification has transformed the Mission district from a largely working-class, Latino neighborhood into a trendy home for tech workers.
“We’ve become committed to being a space that is a voice for marginalized, disenfranchised communities,” Wilson said. “That’s more of our purpose than anything else.”
After the most recent spate of vandalism, volunteers quickly turned out to the alley to clean up the mess in time for the unveiling of the new murals.
“They want to silence us, and they’re not going to,” Wilson said. “Because we are fierce and we don’t back down. If anything, we just get stronger through this.”
