Fish - O glorious city: a love letter to San Francisco

Illustrations copyright 2017 by Jeremy Fish.
Text copyright 2017 by the San Francisco Arts Commission.
Photograph on copyright 2017 by Rick Marr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 9781452156132 (epub, mobi)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Fish, Jeremy, artist.
Title: O glorious city : a love letter to San Francisco / Jeremy Fish.
Description: San Francisco : Chronicle Books, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016010963 | ISBN 9781452156040 (hc)
Subjects: LCSH: Fish, Jeremy,Themes, motives. | San Francisco City Hall (San Francisco, Calif.)In art. | San Francisco (Calif.)In art. | San Francisco (Calif.)BiographyPortraits.
Classification: LCC NC139.F485 A72 2017 | DDC 700.92dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016010963

Design by Alice Chau

Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, California 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com

MEG SHIFFLER
Director and Chief Curator, San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries

On March 19, 2015, Associate Curator Jackie Im and I met Jeremy Fish in the North Light Court of historic San Francisco City Hall to discuss perhaps the craziest proposal the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Galleries has ever presented to an artist.

He was waiting for us at a small caf table, sporting his signature salt-and-pepper beard, canvas of forearm tattoos, and matching custom-made pants and shirt with a quail motif. After quick introductions, I asked if he would consider creating one hundred drawings in approximately one hundred days to celebrate the one hundredth birthday of City Hall.

After almost twenty years as a respected, trailblazing fine artist and commercial illustrator, Jeremy had a good idea how a project of this scale would challenge his creative process and require a deep level of personal commitment, but it was immediately clear that he also recognized the historic relevance and cultural impact of creating this massive, City-commissioned love letter to San Francisco. With a smile and a mischievous twinkle in his eye, he responded, Lets do it, but do you think I could have an office here? After an hour of rapid-fire conversation, we agreed to move forward and expand the original proposal to include an artist residency, downtown kiosk posters (inspired by an earlier SFAC proposal by Fish), a major exhibition, and a book. That was the moment I learned that Jeremy doesnt do anything halfway.

Born in 1974 in Albany, New York, Jeremy spent his restless teenage years skateboarding, drawing, and reading Thrasher magazine. There was no place he wanted to be more than San Francisco, which was, according to Jeremy, the skateboarding capital of the world in the mid-1990s, and home to Gwynn and Fausto Vitello, the publishers of skateboarding magazines Thrasher and Slap and later the influential art magazine Juxtapoz. So, in 1994 he relocated here to study painting and screen printing at the venerable San Francisco Art Institute, earned his BFA degree in 1997, and immediately started working for the Vitellos at their print shop producing T-shirts, stickers, posters, and prints. Five years later he was appointed art director for one of their companies, Think Skateboards. Jeremy worked for the Vitellos from 1997 through 2005, and during this time he produced a popular illustrated two-page spread in Slap every month, as well as a poster for Juxtapoz that he credits as one of the vehicles that set his career in motion on an international stage.

Since those early days, Jeremy has steadily built a career moving fluidly between creating fine art for galleries and museums worldwide, illustrating for small local businesses as well as major commercial clients, producing apparel designs ranging from T-shirts to shoes, embellishing public sites with murals and sculptures, and generating a myriad of other projects like album covers and books. His fan base has expanded out from its early foundation in the skateboard community to an enormous and diverse international following of collectors, curators, gallerists, publishers, and enthusiasts who hotly anticipate and support each new creative endeavor.

When the news dropped about Jeremys O Glorious City project at City Hall, his 475,000 Facebook followers, the San Francisco arts community, and the press reacted with a tidal wave of excitement. Initially there was a lot of speculation as to why Jeremy was selected for this project. As an artist whos built a successful international career almost exclusively on the fringes of the established art scene, with very few interactions with major institutions, he might seem an unlikely candidate to partner with a municipal arts agencyuntil his creative output and commitment to San Francisco is considered in depth. Over the past twenty years, Jeremys work has consistently paid homage to San Francisco and his beloved neighborhood of North Beach, through themes related to the Citys history, architecture, politics, culture, and eclectic, trailblazing public figures. For example, in his ambitious 2012 exhibition Where Hearts Get Left, drawings of the City being held up by anatomical hearts and skulls mounted in sculptural Golden Gate Bridge frames mingled with stylized teak sculptures of Emperor Norton, a flamboyant nineteenth-century local rabble-rouser, and a phoenix, a symbol for San Franciscos rebirth and resilience after the 1906 earthquake. Jeremy is an outspoken defender of the City, and for his entire adult life San Francisco has played a significant role in defining both his artwork and his identity. As the curator of this project, I could think of no one more suited than Jeremy to tackle this epic celebratory commission.

The first step was to insure that Jeremy was comfortably ensconced as the first-ever SFAC Galleries Artist in Residence at City Hall. (The SFAC Galleries has produced large and ambitious exhibitions at City Hall since 1996, but this was its first residency.) It only took a few moments for City Hall Building Manager Rob Reiter to jump on board with enthusiastic, no-holds-barred support. Rob was the key to accessing the building, and during his first meeting with Jeremy he offered multiple locations for an artist-in-residence office and studio, including a room with pay phones under the Rotundas Grand Staircase and a room full of historic documents and ephemera related to City Hall. Although the phone room was tempting, Jeremy took up residence in the tiny, dark archive room in July 2015, bent on the task of observing daily activity, conducting historical research, and meeting staff and visitors in order to fuel concepts for a hundred drawings. From his desk, perched above the South Light Court, he could see politicians in heated discussion moving through the building, City employees engaging in a noontime Zumba class, docents leading tours for hundreds of visitors every day, bridal parties waiting their turn to say I do, and much more.

In the following months, Jeremy donned his official Artist in Residence vest and rode his trusty Dutch delivery bike across town three days a week to work on the drawings and carve out time to greet fans and supporters who stopped by to say hello and offer encouragement. He pried the City Hall historian, Ellen Schumer, for information and behind-the-scenes stories, made friends with the family that runs the caf in the basement, and trekked to places in the building not accessible to the public where he learned more about its architectural history and what it takes to keep the massive structure operable.