Bay Area Walls

Comics artist and writer Gene Luen Yang creates formally innovative narrative work that illuminates history and identity. His mural for Bay Area Walls depicts three local basketball athletes—Stephen Curry, Jeremy Lin, and Fran Belibi—linking their stories to fundamental aspects of the game. Yang authored Dragon Hoops, an acclaimed nonfiction graphic novel centered on Oakland's Bishop O'Dowd High School basketball team's 2014–15 season.

Isaac Vazquez Avila's practice fuses hand-painted signage with influences ranging from David Alfaro Siqueiros' Mexican muralism to the DIY spirit of Los Angeles' Ramona Gardens and Estrada Courts. His upcoming Bay Area Walls mural will reference coastal and inland landscapes, blending energetic, textured strokes with diverse artistic traditions.

Jenifer K Wofford creates painted murals that explore individual presence and bodily tension. For Bay Area Walls, she depicts Victoria Manalo Draves, the first Asian American Olympic gold medalist and Filipina American diver from San Francisco's South of Market district. Wofford's work captures a "soft inward focus combined with the mannered tension" of Draves suspended in a pike against vast color gradients, balancing display with interiority.

Craig Calderwood works with visually bold yet intricate vernacular of symbols and patterns to tell stories of transformation and loss. Their commissioned mural Omen Studies centers an oleander tree witnessing San Francisco's Mission District gentrification, urban surveillance, and the disappearance of queer spaces, portraying the gradual erasure of neighborhood identity.