SAN FRANCISCO PART 3: ART IN PUBLIC PLACES

San Francisco oozes artsy-ness.  I especially love the outdoor art.  Take a look (click on the individual picture for a close-up):

Sidewalk art in a back alley in Chinatown: "The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world."  -John Steinbeck

There were about a dozen of these.  "Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations."  -Lawrence Ferlinghetti

TO REMEMBER ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: "To be honest, to be kind. To earn a little, to spend a little less. To make upon the whole a family happier for his presence.  To renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered.  To keep a few friends but these without capitulation.  Above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself.  Here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy."

I especially loved all the murals.  I started paying more attention to murals when I first got interested in Banksy, the British street artist.  (See previous posts about Banksy here and here.)  San Francisco has some wonderful "street art."

This next series is my favorite piece (or pieces) of art from the entire Outdoor Collection.  See what appear to be white birds flying in front of the awesome mural on the building below?

It is actually a "flock of books" suspended high above the sidewalk with bindings spread wide like wings:

But be careful walking underneath those books; they are dropping their messes all over the sidewalk:

 

"San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel.  Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. 

That is the whole truth."

-William Saroyan