Check out this crazy cool North Park mural! It’s spray painted in the same alley as the Greetings from San Diego “postcard” mural that I blogged about four years ago here.
I see in the corner of this super colorful street art that it was created by @aangeltearz, @esc4Per0ute and @elsiethecowww!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
The San Diego Museum of Art’s new exhibition Young Art 2021: My World, Our Planet has opened!
At the title suggests, the museum’s biennial Youth Art exhibition has an environmental theme this year. Students from schools all around San Diego County have contributed.
There’s a new twist this time, however!
Professional artists, coordinated by Mindful Murals, are reimagining 25 works of this outstanding youth art by painting SDG&E utility boxes from Balboa Park down Park Boulevard into downtown San Diego. Every utility box “recreates” a canvas painted by a young person!
I’ve already photographed many of the utility boxes. So I was excited to see all the great original youth art hanging on the San Diego Museum of Art’s walls!
Wouldn’t it be fun, I thought, to compare some of the original art with the painted utility boxes? Of course it would!
The professional artists painting the boxes were encouraged to interpret the student canvases in their own unique way. You can see significant differences. (And painting an outdoor utility box that will be seen momentarily by passing motorists and pedestrians is very different than painting a canvas with a fine brush.)
To view photos of many more utility boxes, click here.
So, without further ado, here come the comparisons!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
While walking up Park Boulevard in East Village today I discovered more utility boxes that are being painted for the San Diego Museum of Art’s cool outdoor exhibition Young Art: Outside the Frame!
Most of the boxes you see here are located around Park Boulevard and F Street. Last weekend I discovered other newly painted utility boxes in this same general area and posted those photos here. Click the link and you’ll learn more about this unique, very cool project!
(I noticed some of those earlier boxes are now finished, and I’ll be updating that blog post with additional images shortly.)
To see even more colorful utility boxes painted for the Young Art: Outside the Frame project, you can check out additional blog posts here and here and here!
As you can see in the next photo, the fun goldfish box was painted by Ground Floor Murals. They also created a super cool mural in City Heights celebrating Tony Gwynn. See that here!
For the other boxes that follow, many of which are just getting started, I don’t know the artists yet…
The next three boxes are on the sidewalk adjacent to some very cool East Village murals I blogged about here!
UPDATE!
Here are a couple photos I took several days later…
ANOTHER UPDATE!
And a week or so later I took more photos! I now see the box with the words YOU ARE MAGIC is by artist Amanda Lopez (@amanda.makes.art). The box with the whale in the clouds is by Tory Brooke Marshall (@afrothynothing). And the face with flowing red scarf is by Mindful Murals!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
You can easily explore Cool San Diego Sights by using the search box on my blog’s sidebar. Or click a tag! There are thousands upon thousands of photos for you to enjoy!
This morning I spotted five more utility boxes that are being painted for the San Diego Museum of Art’s project Young Art: Outside the Frame!
These five boxes are all in downtown San Diego’s East Village neighborhood, along Park Boulevard between E Street and Market Street. Other boxes I’ve previously spotted are also along Park Boulevard, but to the north. To see those colorful utility boxes, click here and here and here!
The unique outdoor exhibition Young Art: Outside the Frame is a collaboration between the San Diego Museum of Art, SDG&E, and Mindful Murals who is coordinating the many artists.
Environmental artwork that has been selected from the museum’s upcoming biennial exhibition of local student art (this year titled Young Art 2021: My World, Our Planet) is being reproduced by professional artists on 25 SDG&E utility boxes. A map of the box locations is forthcoming, and I will post it!
The five boxes I spied today are in various stages of completion. I can identify one of the artists so far. The black box with the blue sea life is by Shelly S. (@fairywulf).
I’ll post updates as I learn and discover more in the days ahead!
(The upcoming photo is of a mural directly across Park Boulevard from the above box. It’s titled The Strength of the Women. It was painted by renowned artist Rafael Lopez years ago. I blogged about it in 2014. You can see those photos here.)
Now back to the boxes…
UPDATE!
The following weekend I took photos that show some of the above boxes are now finished.
I see the utility box with the flowers and the face on top is by Donovan Diaz (@drawntworks). The now completed black and white box with the wildlife is by Amanda Kazemi (@grayfractal). And the box with the wind turbines is by Sean Hnedak.
ANOTHER UPDATE!
The last box in this group is finished. I see the artwork is by Carlos Quezada and Melody De Los Cobos (@chicanalilly)!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
You can easily explore Cool San Diego Sights by using the search box on my blog’s sidebar. Or click a tag! There are thousands upon thousands of photos for you to enjoy!
I have all sorts of random images saved on my computer from various walks in the past month or so. The photos I’m posting now were taken in San Ysidro, a little north of the Mexican border.
I discovered these colorful bits of street art as I wandered about.
Enjoy!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
If you’ve ever entered or departed downtown Escondido via West Valley Parkway, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a large, quite interesting sculpture a short distance east of Interstate 15. The sculpture stands at the intersection of Valley Parkway and Tulip Street, right next to the Gateway Shopping Center.
The cast bronze sculpture is titled Community. It was created by local artist Jeff Lindeneau in 1990.
The sun’s light forms dynamic human shapes that are “cut out” of the two triangular sections of Community.
According to a City of Escondido walking tour brochure: “This bronze, copper and locally mined granite sculpture celebrates people living and building together to achieve a common goal. The dramatic sculpture’s shape is reminiscent of the mountains surrounding Escondido with a central passageway depicting the valley.”
I like how you can see trees, hillsides, signs, buildings, light posts and electrical wires inside the human shapes. They, too, are part of Community.
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
You can easily explore Cool San Diego Sights by using the search box on my blog’s sidebar. Or click a tag! There are thousands upon thousands of photos for you to enjoy!
I’m not sure when the Cat Cult mural was painted in North Park, but it’s been on a parking lot wall off Ohio Street just north of University Avenue since at least 2013. The colors have faded and in places the paint has peeled away.
As far as I can determine, this cool mural is the creation of widely known artists Surge and Persue–I do recognize the latter’s Bunny Kitty character. I’ve also read Cat Cult is a graffiti/street art collective that operates primarily in Los Angeles.
Whatever it’s exact history might be, this mural is definitely awesome!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
You can easily explore Cool San Diego Sights by using the search box on my blog’s sidebar. Or click a tag! There are thousands upon thousands of photos for you to enjoy!
Today I noticed that two more SDG&E utility boxes are being painted for the San Diego Museum of Art’s cool project Young Art: Outside the Frame!
These two boxes can be found on Park Boulevard, just north of the City College trolley station. They are located in front of several large colorful murals by @ladieswhopaint that I blogged about here.
These are two boxes of 25 total that will be painted. To see five other boxes that I’ve already spied, and to learn more about Young Art: Outside the Frame, check out two recent blog posts here and here!
The box you see in the first few photos is being painted by professional artist Alyssa Stewart. She showed me a copy of the original artwork that was selected from many pieces in the San Diego Museum of Art’s upcoming Young Art exhibition.
The second utility box is being painted by artist Lucy Helle. Check out her Instagram page here. She also showed me a copy of the original youth art she is working from.
I plan to post more photos as I discover more boxes, and update as boxes are completed! Stay tuned!
UPDATE!
I swung by a few days later and these two boxes appear to be finished!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
You can easily explore Cool San Diego Sights by using the search box on my blog’s sidebar. Or click a tag! There are thousands upon thousands of photos for you to enjoy!
Stand by the water at La Jolla Cove and look up toward the buildings on the hill above you. Is that the ocean up there, too?
See that lone palm tree painted on a building with a cloud shaped like a brain hovering above it? That’s one of the Murals of La Jolla, and it’s the creation of an internationally famous conceptual artist, John Baldessari. His Brain/Cloud (with Seascape and Palm Tree), 2011, can be viewed up close by diners at the George’s at the Cove restaurant.
John Baldessari explained: “A brain can look like a cloud if you manipulate it in the right way. We see things in clouds. It looks like it’s hovering almost from outer space. I like banal images and I can’t think of anything more banal than a palm tree and an ocean.”
In the present day, with the rising importance of artificial intelligence and cloud computing, this curious image might suggest something quite different!
Born in National City, Baldessari grew up in San Diego. According to Wikipedia: “In 1959, Baldessari began teaching art in the San Diego school system. He taught for nearly three decades, in schools and junior colleges and community colleges, and eventually at the university level. When the University of California decided to open up a campus in San Diego, the new head of the Visual Art Department, Paul Brach, asked Baldessari to be part of the originating faculty in 1968…” He passed away last year.
Baldessari’s work has been the subject of over 200 national and international solo exhibitions, and his awards are numerous. His provocative art often poses unusual questions, poking at accepted norms, directing the viewer’s perception and mind in unexpected directions.
In the past I’ve photographed a couple other representations of his art, which you can see here and here.
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
You can easily explore Cool San Diego Sights by using the search box on my blog’s sidebar. Or click a tag! There are thousands upon thousands of photos for you to enjoy!
I met the creator of beautiful murals today!
I was walking through La Jolla’s scenic Ellen Browning Scripps Park, gazing at the ocean, when I came upon a friendly artist selling some prints and a decorative surfboard. I soon learned that she is also a muralist, and that she has painted a very colorful mural in La Jolla’s Arcade Building!
So afterward I guided my feet in that direction!
Melanie Sojourner-Truth Atesalp is the artist’s name. Now that I’ve read her bio, I can see why her smile is so deep.
Her unique background and life experiences can be read at her website here. She’s all about imagination and laughter, healing and wisdom. She designed the large mural at the new SDSU Healing Garden and Meditation Space. Right now she’s concentrating on creating graphic novels and writing children’s literature.
If you like the mural you’re about to see, check out her website where there is art you can purchase!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
Cool San Diego Sights! 