San Francisco's ingenuity.
Lulu’s studio is in the Art Explosion building in San Francisco’s Mission District. Lulu loved it as soon as she saw the great big windows on either side of the studio and the funky apparatus overhead that was solving the leaky roof problem with plastic tarps and rubber hosing that emptied into the sink. Nobody does bohemia like San Francisco. Maybe that’s what happens when you’re sitting next to a fault line. Everything becomes acceptable and chaos is handled with humor and style.
Artists tend to like chaos, the friction needed to create. Lulu has been part of a lot of artistic communities and founded one herself: Roy Street Collective in Montreal back in the 2010’s. She’s uncomfortable when artist communities lose their souls because of power structures and money. She was once part of an artist community that was run by a board of directors. (Lulu has a hard time with authoritarianism in the art world - Montrealers are a seditious lot). She ended up graffitiing the toilet stalls in the woman’s bathroom in protest and getting kicked out. In her defense may I say she was only looking for some feedback - none of which was received – except that the director sent an email out to the artists saying how graffiti was illegal and that if they ever found out who did it – they’d sick the police on them. Well never mind, Lulu is on to better things at the 17th Street Art Explosion studios where the owners are very laissez-faire, no jury, no meetings and no directors. Funny thing is despite there being an open door policy the caliber of art is on a par with any juried art communities I’ve ever seen.
Artists tend to like chaos, the friction needed to create. Lulu has been part of a lot of artistic communities and founded one herself: Roy Street Collective in Montreal back in the 2010’s. She’s uncomfortable when artist communities lose their souls because of power structures and money. She was once part of an artist community that was run by a board of directors. (Lulu has a hard time with authoritarianism in the art world - Montrealers are a seditious lot). She ended up graffitiing the toilet stalls in the woman’s bathroom in protest and getting kicked out. In her defense may I say she was only looking for some feedback - none of which was received – except that the director sent an email out to the artists saying how graffiti was illegal and that if they ever found out who did it – they’d sick the police on them. Well never mind, Lulu is on to better things at the 17th Street Art Explosion studios where the owners are very laissez-faire, no jury, no meetings and no directors. Funny thing is despite there being an open door policy the caliber of art is on a par with any juried art communities I’ve ever seen.
Lulu's studio at Art Explosion.
Lulu’s studio is in a part of Art Explosion the natives call “Shantytown”. There are approximately 40 open and exposed studios in Shantytown which means the artists have to trust and cooperate with each other concerning the volume of music, kitchen maintenance, dogs running around and having their stuff laying about for anyone to take. And it all works. No meetings, no petty emails, no bad vibes or pandering to the higher ups - there are no higher ups. It’s a beautiful society based on human values and loving kindness that pretty much reflects the disposition of San Francisco in general.
San Francisco collage by Louise Markus.
One of Lulu’s favorite things to do in San Francisco is taking the bus, which she says is like a Shakespearean tragicomedy on wheels. Like one native San Franciscan noted - you don’t have to get season tickets to the theater, just get a bus pass. Lulu takes the 9 bus along Potrero Avenue to get to her studio. As this runs past the San Francisco General Hospital, someone in a wheelchair inevitably wants to get on and when that happens the people on the bus come together as a community in order to facilitate this effort. The bus driver lowers the bus and folds out the ramp, passengers stand on their seats to make way, others vacate their places to make room for the disabled, making sure their former seats are properly locked away, and still others help getting the wheelchair in place and locked in. When Lulu first saw this mini-community in action for the first time she was overwhelmed by the empathy of the human spirit.
San Francisco collage by Louise Markus
The whole bus thing can really get Lulu going and she often talks about it to people – some of whom come from a class that turn their noses down at public transport. To them the buses are full of undesirables: working class people, drug addicts and the disenfranchised. This class of people are so fearful of the bus, their eyes bug out like a deer facing headlights (not mine – I would never hit a deer) when she tells them how much she loves it. But Lulu’s got a champion in John Waters, the movie director who at a recent lecture in San Francisco said the most controversial comment he ever made was how much he loves riding the bus in San Francisco. I guess that shared reaction characterizes our intrepid nomad artist as a real Lulu.
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