2025 Art on Market Street Poster Series: Places

The 2025 Art on Market Street Poster Series will showcase the over 30 year history of the Art on Market Street Poster Series. The works are curated through a lens of “People, Places, and Things,” reflecting historical events, notable individuals, everyday people, art, and architecture that are significant to San Francisco’s cultural and physical landscape. This project intersects with the continued work of SFAC’s Shaping Legacy program by calling attention to underrepresented communities and overlooked histories. 

The second group of posters: “Places” highlight: idiosyncratic neighborhoods, public parks, distinctive geographic and topographical features, and street scenes of the city. 

"Sky" from the 1994 series Market Street Tales by Rigo – Graphic depiction of Rigo’s iconic Sky mural.*

 

 

"Park" from the 2000 series Market Street 2000 by Amy Ellingson – Ellingson’s striking graphic posters layer architecture, ads, and visual detritus from Market Street to critique American culture’s obsession with spectacle and consumption. This poster features the facade of the parking garage located on 3rd Street near SFMOMA. 

 

"Embarcadero" 2000 by Stanley Chan – Chan’s drawings of common place sights along Market Street, layered with handwritten stories and other collaged elements evoke that memory and longing.*

 

 

"Admist Sunshine & Rain" from the 2004 series Peripheral Visions by Jason Jagel – Jagel’s Peripheral Visions series presents narrative paintings of imagined urban episodes inspired by Market Street’s diverse sights and textures. 




 

"Creeks" from the 2007 series Between above and below by Amanda Hughen & Jennifer Starkweather – This collaborative duo visualizes invisible systems, such as pedestrian movement, seismic activity, and tidal flow through intricately layered geometric prints. In this image, Hughen Starkweather's black dots and tiny holes represent the location of some of the original creeks that ran through downtown San Francisco in the mid 1800's. These marks also map the thickness of saturated sediment in the area in 1994. Hughen created layers of circles in the background to reference water: the circular form of bubbles and the circular pattern that appears when light bounces off water.

 

"The Built World" from the 2007 series Wish You Were Here! Postcards From Our Awesome Future by Packard Jennings & Steve Lambert – Collaboratively, Jennings and Lambert offer a speculative look at San Francisco’s future, visualizing ideas from architects and planners unconstrained by politics or physics—resulting in imaginative posters of floating transit lines, rooftop farms, and utopian urban fixes.*

 

"Dolores Park" from the 2009 series Taking In by Pamela Helena Wilson – Helena Wilson’s watercolor series reinterprets archival photographs of people in San Francisco parks, offering quiet moments of contemplation amid Market Street’s bustle. A watercolorist, the artist draws inspiration from newspaper and media photographs. She is interested in the ephemeral quality of these images, how they come and go on a daily basis and how they register in our collective memories

 

 

"The Hill" from the 2011 series The Golden Spoke by Ian Huebert – Huebert takes viewers on a joyful bicycle ride across San Francisco, celebrating iconic locales and the freedom of two-wheeled travel. 

 

 

"Chinatown" from the 2013 series Celebrating Bay Area Arts by Paul Madonna – Known for All Over Coffee, Madonna pairs pen-and-ink drawings of city landmarks with stories of local artists, honoring San Francisco’s creative heritage. The Chinatown poster of Grant Street is paired with a quote from best-selling author and local Bay Area resident Amy Tan

"Golden Gate Park" from the 2013 series Active San Francisco by Mark Ulriksen – Ulriksen’s whimsical series captures a day in the life of active San Franciscans swimming, skating, biking—through colorful, lively illustrations.*

 

 

"North Beach" from the 2013 series Strangerhood by Lordy Rodriguez – Rodriguez imagines six iconic neighborhoods as independent nations in Strangerhood, using cartographic language to explore collective identity and place. Using photographic source materials, Rodriquez created each map by assigning patterns and textures to specific territories or “states” within each country. The signs and symbols that identify the neighborhoods represent cities or towns in each place.

 

 

"16th Avenue Tiled Steps Project" from the 2014 series Wild Spicy Growing Gritty Spirited Transmission by Ranu Mukherjee – Mukherjee’s layered imagery celebrates the SFAC Civic Art Collection by interpreting six iconic public artworks through pattern, color, and artist quotations. 16th Avenue Tiled Steps Project is a work in the Civic Art Collection by the artist team Aileen Barr and Colette Crutcher. 

 

 

"Party Animals" from the 2015 series Party Animals by Andrea Bergen – Bergen’s bold collages depict City Hall’s birthday celebration with partying animals and surreal imagery, blending humor with civic pride. The installed poster features City Hall’s grand staircase juxtaposed with an array of animals from the San Francisco Zoo, who are shown barking, jumping, eating pizza and drinking beer among balloons. 

 

 

"The Office" from the 2016 series SF New City Atlas by Lauren Bartone - Bartone transforms everyday materials collected from Market Street into interpretive maps, exploring labor, transportation, public space, and social desires in the city. Over several months in 2015, Bartone collected detritus from Market Street and its surrounds. Transforming the materials of everyday life, the artist has created interpretive maps that explore a selection of issues tied to social experiences in the city.

 

 

"St. Francis Theater, 965 Market Street, 2012 [Bargain Matinee]" from the 2016 series Market Street Marquees by Jeff Canham – Canham reimagines vintage theater marquees from Market Street’s past using a vibrant typographic aesthetic that speaks to the city’s cultural memory. The installed poster is from the St. Francis Theater located at 965 Market Street, showing how the marquee looked in 2012 with burnt out letters. 

 

*not reprinted for this installation but shown here to highlight the breadth and depth of the over 30 year history of the Art on Market Street Poster Series.