Cheers to the "Paint The Void" Artist Initiative during COVID-19!

As many say, “any threat can be turned into an opportunity”, and that’s exactly what some brave street artists from San Francisco and the whole Bay Area are doing during these difficult COVID-19 lockdown weeks.

Their original and creative initiative has been to create a coalition of local artists and to start painting colorful murals on the boarded-up storefronts, transforming with color the solitary landscape of many streets in San Francisco.

“For me it’s like how can I give right now?” said artist Nora Bruhn as she painted the petals of a flower on the boarded Chez Maman restaurant at the corner of Hayes and Gough.

This unique effort full of love and solidarity is coordinated through the arts agency Building 180 and the local non-profit Art for Civil Discourse in a project named “Paint the Void”, where they are leading a fundraising campaign to pay struggling artists while breathing life into the locked-down SF neighborhoods.

The artists started painting several murals in the Hayes Valley neighborhood and are gradually expanding to other SF neighborhoods and the east bay. Each artist is working together with local business owners who are giving their permission and really happy to see vacant storefronts transformed into perfect canvases for these committed local artists.

“Everybody’s on lockdown and we don’t have that direct communication right now,” local artist Duser says, “so it’s really important to be able to speak to people on some level.”

From Wall and Wall's artistic eyes, we want to recognize this outstanding initiative with this post and accompany it with a warm donation that has already been passed over to this incredible team!

We would like to encourage all of you to contribute to the cause while reminding you that, although this lockdown isn’t a wanted or positive scenario, there’s always someone willing to bring forth some color to these pretty dark times... Hopefully these art pieces even become collectionist material from the COVID-19 era! ;)

“We can take them down maybe have an art show, we can auction them off,” says local artist Ehrman. “We can give them back to the community.”

For information on how to help the artists in this project, visit PaintTheVoid.org

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