Ellen and Lance Anderson are visiting their son in the Sunset, all the way from upstate New York. They'd read about the mural they're now standing in front of in the newspaper that morning, and decided to make a trip out to the Mission to check it out. “And maybe get something to eat,” Lance told me, looking around at the vendors setting up around us and the mural for the Mission Community Market's first day of 2011. 

No snacks being forthcoming, the Andersons settled on peppering artist Ben Wood with questions about the seven years of work that had culminated on the wall in question. Was he really the one who had photographed the 1700s mural on an interior wall of the Mission Dolores, a mural hidden for centuries by the main reredos? Read more »

Given that he's best known for his series of tiny, jewel-like airbrushed hummingbirds, it may strike his hordes of ardent fans as dissonant that street artist Dan Witz's latest offerings are so, well, fucked up. His current show at White Walls (on display through Feb. 5) is comprised of fake grated windows that Witz sneak-bolts onto buildings. The windows reveal chiaroscuro women with ball gags in their mouths and wasted man-prisoners. Witz, a classically trained artist, has rendered them realistically enough to invoke stomach-lurching concern in the onlooker. WTF, right?

But the artist, who I called up at while he was working at his chilly studio in dead-of-winter New York City, doesn't see the birdies and the ball gags as being all that different. “Everything I do is an act of cultural aggression in some way,” he says. In 1979, when a young Witz airbrushed 40 of his now-famous hummers below 14th Street in Manhattan, their preciousness was a radical departure from the then-current trends in street art. Now, he says, his window grates onto depravity similarly represent what's lacking in today's milieu. Read more »