CONVERSATION
Ben Davis isn’t waiting around. His public art group Illuminate is turning the JFK Promenade — the stretch of JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park closed to cars — into a painted playground dubbed the Golden Mile, a project pointedly aimed at voters deciding whether to bring cars back to the street in November’s election.
Commissioned by the city, Davis is enlisting a dozen artists to design 11 murals, painted by volunteers, along the road. The Golden Mile will also bring out chairs, games, drinks, and musicians to “help people see the great potential of what we have here,” Davis tells The Frisc.
What’s more, the murals will hide the marks left by road crews as they remove lane stripes and other vestiges of JFK’s car-based life.
It’s the latest and least illuminated of the projects Davis has helped organize in the city. The first was the now-iconic Bay Lights, 25,000 LEDs by artist Leo Villareal that dance across the north side of the Bay Bridge as if set to a silent soundtrack.
Illuminate is also responsible for the pink triangle that lights up Twin Peaks above the Castro during Pride Month; a makeover of Golden Gate Park’s Spreckles Temple of Music bandshell and the ongoing Lift Every Voice concert series there; lights and music inside Grace Cathedral; the Monumental Reckoning sculptures; and the psychedelic show projected on the Conservatory of Flowers that marked the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. As with other Illuminate projects, the Conservatory light show continues to this day.
“I’ve spent as much time as anyone on JFK through projects like the Conservatory and Spreckels Temple of Music,” Davis says, “thinking about how to go deep into the energy of a place.”
The Frisc caught up with Davis in Golden Gate Park and chatted about his latest endeavor.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
The Frisc: Why are you doing this mural work on the JFK pavement?
Ben Davis: I’ve been delighted to see JFK closed to cars but open to people, and watching its value in public health, mental health, and spiritual health during the pandemic. I was also very happy, after the marathon bare-knuckled session with the Board of Supervisors, that it was made permanently car-free. But I was discouraged to see the use of private wealth to try to overturn an important city victory.
So we’ve thrown ourselves into action. Our job is to reveal the promise of this road where bicycles and pedestrians are now allowed to pass safely. We want to see how we can help people see the great potential of what we have here and not lose that. It’s an important time for San Francisco.
How is this a key time for the city?
As you draw a string through SF history, there’s been periods of great devastation and then cultural reemergence. Right now, I can feel it happening when I talk to people. I’m not quite sure how it will happen, but with everyone bringing their creativity to bear, we’ll hit the potential of it and spread it across the city.
Why are you choosing this stretch of pavement?
We wanted to help engineer a quick-moving experiment along JFK that builds community. We want our work to build the future of the road in any post-November environment. This is an exercise in nimble and creative thinking: a place for people first where we remove all striping and stop signs and make it feel like less of a road and more of a place for people. So when three Doggie Diner heads or a piano shows up in the middle of the road, it magically feels less like a road.
You usually work in lights. Why murals on asphalt?
Painting is a wonderful way to engage a diversity of artists around the city. We’re working with Paint the Void, a really great group led by Shannon Riley and Meredith Winner. They aligned artists and building owners to paint boarded-up storefronts during COVID so the spaces didn’t wind up with graffiti. They were super respectful with artists on those murals, and they looked to diversity and positive expression.
The hope is the project will get the city to take a deep breath and think deeply of what JFK will be when we liberate it from cars.
What else do you have planned for the space, and what’s the cost?
We’ve not secured all the funding, but the project is a half a million dollars. It’s a lot and not a lot of money at the same time, particularly when you think about what Salesforce is spending on what they’re doing this week.
But we’re working on a significant piece of urban infrastructure at an extreme bargain, and we’re mustering all this in the course of less than two months. That’s very fast on the scale of urban transformation. We’ll be adding pieces over time. There’ll be 100 golden Adirondack chairs for people to socialize, a beer and wine garden, cement ping pong tables and cornhole — though I hate to use that term — and busker stations with amplification for people to come and perform. We’re flying very fast.
It’s hard to visually take in the entire project on foot. Any plans for drone photos?
Have you ever tried to get permission from the city for drones? During Pride, we were trying to project rainbows in the sky. To do it, we had planned to put projectors on the Ferry Building. Just as we were going to do it, permission to use the Ferry Building was removed, so some people decided to go rogue and were calling around for scissor lifts to get projectors on the building. Then the Port of SF folks offered Harry Bridges Plaza and got us permissions — safe to say, we had to do a lot of work very quickly.
In this case, the system is yielding wisely to getting a more vibrant city.
Kristi Coale is a staff writer for The Frisc, covering transit, streets, and more.