There are at least 30,000 square feet of blank walls in downtown San Jose.
For example, there’s the 7,000-square-foot wall that faces San Fernando between 2nd and 3rd streets, a sandy beige backdrop to a swath of surface parking. And the cream-colored 150-foot-tall wall of Casa Del Pueblo, a multi-family development on the high-profile corner of Market and San Carlos. Not to mention around 1,000 square feet of gray on the west-facing wall of the Tech Shop on San Carlos.
Or at least that wall was 1,000 square feet of gray up until mid-June, when the Exhibition District premiered its first mural by local artist Mathew Scicluna. It depicts a woman pressing a button that releases colorful cogs and streams, in a nod to the spirit of innovation at the Tech Shop and in Silicon Valley. Black and white, golden yellow, crimson, mint green and watermelon-candy pink have replaced the old gray.
The mural breathes life into a particularly quiet stretch of 2nd Street, and it’s made possible by a new nonprofit organization called the Exhibition District. Founder Erin Salazar has made news by announcing her ambitious plan to cover 40,000 square feet of blank walls in San Jose with murals — the 30,000 she’s already identified, plus another 10,000 that she estimates she missed on her initial count. The name of her organization, she says, refers to the concept of an open-air art gallery, like those found in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood or Wynwood Walls in Miami.
But bringing large-scale public art to downtown San Jose is the colorful packaging of Salazar’s real goal for the Exhibition District: To harvest the local arts economy in San Jose by employing the city’s artists. Salazar wants to change the fact that many artists are frequently expected to work for free, despite their level of training, talent or professionalism. “Artists die of ‘exposure,’” she jokes. The Exhibition District is able to employ artists and provide them with supplies through support from the Knight Foundation, the San Jose Downtown Association, SJ Made, Empire Seven Studios and Café Stritch.
By providing artists with exposure in addition to a paid rate that they can use as a basis for future commissions, Salazar hopes to create a ripple effect that will help retain San Jose’s creative talent — which tends to migrate to other cities where arts opportunities are more plentiful and (if possible) where rent is cheaper. So far, the program seems to be working: Scicluna has received at least four inquiries to commission more (paid) work since his mural debuted at the Tech Shop.
Despite the success of its first mural, the Exhibition District still faces challenges: Salazar says many property owners worry that murals will encourage graffiti, despite the success of anti-graffiti efforts through mural programs in other cities. In fact, public art has been shown to generate income for developers and local government.
Public art also fits in well with San Jose’s goal to encourage downtown as the city’s walkable urban center. In our Getting to Great Places report, we noted that “People react to cues in the environment. If a space is designed for people — if it’s welcoming, safe, and comfortable — they will walk.” Walls that are visually interesting and have been carefully attended to (rather than ones that are empty, tagged or patchy with attempts to cover graffiti) are one of those cues that encourage walking. Public art gives neighborhoods a sense of pride and identity and serves as excellent landmarks for wayfinding.
We hope more property owners will embrace the Exhibition District as a potential economic driver — and professional artists as part of that equation.