Boarded Up During The Lockdown, San Francisco Was Transformed Into A Citywide Mural, Now On View In A Towering Retrospective

April Powers Interior Design has furnished luxury resorts and private residences from Napa Valley to Maui. But when San Francisco locked down in early 2020, Powers had to cover up her own storefront in the Richmond District, boarding the windows with plywood as a precaution against street crime.

She was not alone. Over a several month period, with all but essential services shuttered by a shelter-in-place order, thousands of businesses disappeared behind raw wooden barriers. Seeing the effect on the urban landscape and finding it “apocalyptic”, a local curator named Meredith Winner proposed to pair business owners such as Powers with local artists interested in using the plywood as a support for public murals. Although unofficial at first, and only tacitly approved by city officials, Winner’s privately-funded initiative perfectly paired the needs of the moment: Artists had paid work, and businesses had a way to remain present in neighborhoods desperate for something to look at.

All constituencies responded with enthusiasm. By the end of the lockdown, more than a hundred Bay Area businesses had murals, each site-specific, provided by a nonprofit called Paint the Void.

Powers got one of the finest. In a style reminiscent of both Stuart Davis and Alex Katz (with a touch of Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World), San Francisco painter Emily Fromm portrayed the space behind the plywood as it once was and as everyone hoped it would soon be again.

Yet with Fromm’s work and the art of dozens of other painters, there remained a question: What would happen to the work when the outcome everyone wanted was finally achieved? A book of Paint the Void murals is now in the works. And this week, even as omicron threatens yet another lockdown, a more immediate response can be seen at San Francisco’s Pier 70, a vast space originally used for shipbuilding that is currently hosting an exhibition of painted plywood barriers from all around the city.

Fromm’s storefront is included, as are murals by Bay Area artists such as Cleng Sumagaysay and Max Ehrman (aka Eon75). The largest are forty-three feet long and more than eleven feet high.

Considering the work from this physical remove (if not much distance from an epidemiological perspective), you might be forgiven for feeling underwhelmed. Fromm’s work is anomalous from the standpoint of having a firm conceptual basis, suggesting that art has the power to conjure a better future by focusing the collective imagination on the reality that the artist desires.

Many pieces on display are spectacularly decorative – Ehrman’s painting being a standout – without holding much meaning underneath the layers of paint. Others are politically engaged in the manner of agitprop or entertainingly pop. What is lost in the exhibition is the all-important context: the experience of fantastical escape from impending apocalypse.  

This is no fault of the exhibition curators. On the contrary, it is a compliment to the aptness of the original project. Even if each artist was working independently, all were contributing to a single installation that was as essential as it was extraordinary. That installation took the form of a dream as expansive as the city.