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Weaving new opportunities: San José’s 2020 in pictures

Revitalizing public spaces in a year when the community needed them more than ever

by Reimagining the Civic Commons

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Reimagining the Civic Commons cities found unique and safe ways to encourage the use of public spaces at a time when members of their communities needed connection more than ever. Today, our second in a series of photo essays celebrating public space efforts in cities across the country features San José.

During a period of unprecedented growth, the San José team is focused on transforming Guadalupe River Park, downtown’s north-south greenway, and Santa Clara Street, downtown’s east-west gateway in order to position the city to realize the full potential of its downtown urban public spaces — with public life as the lead redevelopment strategy.

Connecting art and nature

POW! WOW! San Jose and the non-profit Guadalupe River Park Conservancy have teamed up to create the Guadalupe River Art Walk, with a long-term goal of creating the Bay Area’s longest public art corridor. This initiative brings the experience of a global public art movement into one of San José’s most unique natural assets, right in the city’s core: the Guadalupe River Park. In order to introduce dynamic contemporary art and highlight existing art, Guadalupe River Park will act as a “nature studio,” hosting a series of artist-in-residencies over the course of a year, giving visitors a combined experience of public art and parks.

The first artist-in-residence, Roan Victor, just completed her mural titled “Flow of Life.” The vibrant new mural is located over the Guadalupe River on Woz Way and is accessible for the public to view.

To further develop the community’s interaction with arts and nature, each residency will also have a community engagement component, including a public meeting, class with the artist or artwork park signage.

Developing public space advocates

A class of 14 urban planning graduate students at San José State University spent the fall 2020 semester contributing research to the city’s Reimagining the Civic Commons efforts. The team focused primarily on Guadalupe River Park and began by observing the physical conditions of the park and surveying park users. Even though the surveys were conducted under challenging conditions — including the pandemic and wildfire smoke — 150 people in the park responded to the surveys with valuable feedback.

Throughout this process the students were able to spend considerable amount of time in the park observing people’s interactions and use of the park. The students also completed interviews with park users who were able to share their concerns, challenges and wishes for the space. The findings were aggregated by the students into a research report, with key recommendations to enhance the river park and address safety concerns.

Volunteers respond to maintenance demands

Debris and trash continue to be a challenge for urban parks in San José. Unfortunately, the Guadalupe River Park has become a place for illegal dumping of waste and large items. These items block access to our trails and have caused considerable issues with sanitation and pollution within the river. Nevertheless, the park has been supported throughout the year by dedicated volunteers who tirelessly clean up the park by removing trash from the riverbanks. Volunteers from South Bay Clean Creeks Coalition, UC Master Gardeners of Santa Clara County and Guadalupe River Park Conservancy played a critical role in maintaining this public space.

Wildlife returns

Although Guadalupe River Park has seen a decline in people visiting the park due to the pandemic, there have been some bright spots as new types of visitors have started to access the space. We have seen an increase in native species from birds to carp fish reentering the urban park. The natural ecology of the river park is a critical component of San José’s Reimagining the Civic Commons efforts and it has been a source of joy to see habitats thriving in the space this year.

New mural kicks off Guadalupe River Park art project

Roan Victor’s “Flow of Life” depicts the world of San Jose’s main river

by Sal Pizarro, Bay Area News Group
November 17, 2020

Artist Roan Victor‘s mural “Flow of Life” is a colorful addition to the southernmost end of the Guadalupe River Park in San Jose, and it’s expected to be just the beginning of an effort to draw more people to the park through art.

Artist Roan Victor sits in front of her mural, “Flow of Life,” painted on the Woz Way bridge over the Guadalupe River in downtown San Jose as part of an artist-in-residence program for the Guadalupe River Park Conservancy and Pow!Wow! San Jose. (Photograph by Lan Nguyen/Pow!Wow! San Jose)

The mural on the sign bridge on Woz Way that spans the river is the first piece produced by the Guadalupe River Park Conservancy’s artist-in-residence program, a collaboration with Pow!Wow! San Jose. Victor — who owns the Arsenal gallery in Japantown with her husband, artist Sean Boyles — said her intent was to provide a message of hope and a feeling of tranquility by being surrounded by the beauty of nature.

The colorful mural depicts the river along with birds, plants and flowers and an outstretched arm and hand. “The imagery of a river turning into an arm, vice versa, in my proposal essentially represents the river flowing to give life,’ she said. “Historically, I believe the river became a source of food and livelihood to the natives of the land: humans, wildlife and vegetation. And as we approach a changing climate, the river adapts and life keeps flowing.”

Pow!Wow! San Jose, which has brought muralists to the city for the past three years, wants to use the river park as a “nature studio,” with a goal of creating a Guadalupe River Park Art Walk. Pow!Wow! San Jose Co-Director Stacy Kellogg says Victor’s mural is the first step in a vision to produce the longest public art corridor in the Bay Area through a series of residencies for both local and visiting artists.

Wave Of Public Art Murals Pops Up In San Jose

by Len Ramirez, KPIX CBS5
October 25, 2019

SAN JOSE (KPIX) — A new wave of public art murals is popping up in an area of the South Bay where you might not expect.

It is part of a new effort to bring color and energy to suburban neighborhoods in South San Jose.

“People drive by and are honking. Yelling out their cars how much they love it. Kids are on their balconies, saying its beautiful,” said Cameron Moberg, an artist painting a series of three two-story high panels on the side of a Marshalls at a shopping center on Cottle Road.

It’s all part of a San Jose partnership with the arts group PowWow! Walls in East San Jose and the Downtown area have long been the canvas for mural artists.

But this effort, spearheaded by San Jose Councilmember Sergio Jimenez, shifts the focus to the suburban south side.

“People are not going into art galleries or museums in many cases. So having a something in the public can help connect with other people,” said Juan Carlos Araujo who is helping to oversee the project with Pow!Wow! San Jose.

Artist Stephanie Sanchez is bringing color and vibrancy to an otherwise boring bathroom wall at Great Oaks Park in San Jose.

Across the park, other artists are adding geometric designs to an old skate park.

“It’s great to be able to bring this artwork somewhere else,” she said. “Folks from the community are coming around and they are just excited to see life and art come to this wall and this park.”

The painting is just the final step in a year long process of selecting artists and themes for the walls.

But they’ll stand for much longer making walls and neighborhoods a little more lively.

Pow!Wow! San Jose mural fest expands into new territory

by Sal Pizarro, Bay Area News Group
October 24, 2019

It’s no secret that murals abound in San Jose. Our street life has been improved by the addition of wall art in the downtown core, Japantown, Willow Glen, on The Alameda and parts of East San Jose (though some of those have disturbingly disappeared).

The Pow!Wow! San Jose festival has been responsible for bringing a lot of that fresh art to the city since 2017, the product of a great collaboration between Empire Seven Studios and Universal Grammar. Once again, about a dozen artists are adding to the city’s catalog of murals, but this year some of the art will be popping up in an unexpected place: residential South San Jose.

Once the site of countless orchards, earning the area the nickname Blossom Valley, South San Jose turned into tract homes and strip malls starting in the 1960s. I can say from experience it was a great place to grow up in the ’80s, but culture only extended as far as the arcade and cineplex at Oakridge Mall.

Pow!Wow! co-director Stacey Kellogg grew up in South San Jose, too, and knew its residents deserved to be part of the artistic renaissance happening in other parts of the city. The only mural of note in the area is one recently completed by Sam Rodriguez at the Edenvale Library. “A lot of the people who live here aren’t necessarily going to come downtown unless they have a specific reason,” she said. “So we’re bringing the art to them.”

Murals are being painted at the Southside Community Center and the Village Oaks shopping center on Cottle Road, UA Local Union 393’s hall on San Ignacio Avenue, and a skateboard park and restroom building at Great Oaks Park in Edenvale. (You can find locations of all the current and previous murals, as well as information on other related music events this week, at www.powwowsanjose.com.)

San Jose City Councilman Sergio Jimenez, who urged Pow!Wow! to extend the festival to his district, will host a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Saturday from 2 to 6 p.m. at the skate park on Snow and Giusti Drives. And on Sunday, the traditional Pow!Wow! mural bike ride — co-presented by the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition and San Jose Bike Party — will kick off at 11 a.m. from the union hall at 6293 San Ignacio Ave.

Artists add a pop of ‘wow’ to brighten up drab walls in San Jose

by Danny King, Silicon Valley Business Journal
September 30, 2019

Think of Pow! Wow! — a collection of wall murals throughout San Jose — as a series of leaps of faith. The coordinators have to be confident in the artist’s ability, the artists need to be confident that their work will be properly showcased, and the building owners must have faith that the art will be for the public good.

Since the first Pow! Wow! San Jose music, arts and culture festival in 2017, those leaps have been taken many times, as more than 40 murals and wall installations have been created throughout the Bay Area’s largest city.

The brainchild of San Jose art gallery Empire Seven Studios — which includes Juan Carlos Araujo, Jennifer Ahn, Stacey Kellogg, Jaymer Delapena and Tommy Aguilar — the festival will celebrate its third annual event this October.

Among the more notable murals is the 12,000-square-foot work artists How and Nosm produced on the Valley Title Building, while Empire Seven worked with Austrian artist Nychos on the 100-foot-tall “Bleed Teal” mural he recently completed for the San Jose Sharks on the side of an apartment building near SAP Center.

And while a handful of murals have been lost to new development, Empire Seven is looking to broaden the murals’ geographic reach by working with District 2 City Councilmember Sergio Jimenez on adding public artworks in South San Jose.

“We live here, create here, and serve our community as locals who are passionate about enhancing the artistic and cultural experience in our city,” Araujo said.

Status: Started in 2017, ongoing. In 2018, Pow! Wow! and its network of artists added 25 murals and public art installations throughout San Jose. Twenty murals were put up in 2017.

Background: Debuting in 2017, Pow! Wow! San Jose will host its third music, arts and cultural festival in San Jose this October. As part of the event, festival producers and art gallery Empire Seven Studios are working with both local and international artists on adding murals throughout San Jose. At last year’s festival, a Mural Bike Ride attracted more than 500 people.

Challenges: Getting property owners to agree to have a prominent wall covered in artwork can be a challenge, as many of the artists aren’t broadly known to the public, and some of the work can be edgy. Additionally, keeping the murals up poses an additional challenge — a handful of murals in areas such as SoPA and Japantown have been eliminated because the properties have been redeveloped.

Key Players: Empire Seven Studios, Universal Grammar, Mighty Design, Juan Carlos Araujo, Tommy Aguilar, Jennifer Ahn, Jaymer Delapena, Stacey Kellogg, Various artists

How a San Jose artist uses murals to talk about gentrification

By Leonardo Castañeda, Bay Area News Group
September 19, 2019

Juan Carlos Araujo has had as big an impact as anyone in San Jose on what the city looks like. But he’s not a government official or developer — he’s an artist and gallery director that by his own estimate has helped coordinate 100 murals in downtown, Japantown and elsewhere in the city.

Araujo, a self-taught artist, started working with business owners to allow for murals on their walls in Japantown, where his Empire Seven Studios was originally based. Then in 2017, he co-founded the local chapter of the POW! WOW! mural festival, bringing in local and international artists to paint murals throughout the city. Araujo helped create murals including a massive work titled Qualities of Life by Spanish-born twins How and Nosm and a day-and-night themed mural on The Alameda by San Jose-based artist and illustrator Frances Marin Lopez. They’re now fundraising for the third year, this time with murals planned in downtown and south San Jose. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What’s your process for funding and bringing in artists to do mural work in San Jose?

A: My background, of course, is Empire Seven Studios. I’ve had a gallery for about 10 years. We lost the gallery to developers, and in the time that we lost our space in 2017, I initiated the efforts to bring POW! WOW! San Jose, which is in collaboration with POW! WOW! Worldwide. It’s an international mural festival and I’m co-founder and director of that event. And in the last two years I’ve been working with several partners fundraising and just asking everybody to help us because we get everything from cash, in-kind, to moral support. It’s a city effort and most natives that were born and raised here in San Jose have been not only helpful in helping us make the event happen and be successful, but also really just champion something like this coming to their city. Because for years I think we have had a lack of initiative for public art.

I really hope that our efforts influence and really inspire anyone and everybody who wants to do something for their community, to show them that they can do this. You don’t need me and I don’t need to do all the murals. I want to retire soon, so have at it, please.

Q: What are the challenges with straddling being an artist and muralist, but also a businessman and fundraiser to get these murals painted?

A: Well, you know, I think for me, I definitely sacrifice my own art because if you think about it, I’m an artist, too. I’m a painter, so I could have painted all these walls. But I think many artists don’t think that way. They don’t think, let me give this opportunity to somebody else. Most artists want those opportunities for themselves.

Q: There’s not that many walls people will let you paint on.

A: Or people willing to put in the work. Sometimes I have to go years bugging someone for their wall, so it takes dedication, too, not giving up, you know, consistency. You have to show up. We can’t complain about things that aren’t happening without showing up and doing something about it.

Q: There have been some complaints that not enough support goes to local artists. San Jose Inside found that more of the city’s art funding goes to out of town artists than local ones. Do you think San Jose artists are getting enough support?

A: I think the local government agencies that have platforms for funding have contributed, but can contribute more. A good example for me is my projects, once I’ve understood what it takes to do a project, I know that there’s not one grant available through the city of San Jose that could essentially pay for a project of that scale. Those opportunities are not available. So you have to piece it out, you have to do Legos and go get, you know, $8,000 here because that’s the max you can get, and then you have to go get another $20,000 somewhere else.

The system and policies, I think more so, need to change. That’s what I think. The policy in terms of how funding is allocated, at what point do we say this person is doing a tremendous amount of work, let’s give them a check. Do I really need to tell you I’m doing the work? And that’s a problem because it’s a system and that system is bureaucratic. And as artists, you know, it’s really hard to navigate that time to be bureaucratic and attend all these nonprofit meetings that don’t pay your bills, don’t pay your food.

Q: As Google starts moving into San Jose, what do you want them to know about the local arts scene?

A: I think activism is something that San Jose has been a huge leader, in terms of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and the [United] Farm Workers, UFW, that’s something major. You have athletes like John [Carlos] and Tommie Smith, who were at San Jose State University, and those guys were protesting basically to fight for human rights. Luckily, there’s a piece of art at San Jose State University, but other than that, we don’t have any other monuments. Again, our Chicano cultura here in San Jose is also very important.

I think more just really, not doing what everybody else does and that’s just set up a meeting to have this opportunity to say you’re coming and what are you really going to do? Who are you really going to embrace to help you steer your project?

Q: It sounds like you see this art as a way to brighten streets and combat things like illegal dumping by making neighborhoods feel more welcoming and family-friendly.

A: I think what I try to do is come to neighborhoods because this is an asset. [Premium Cutz Barbershop, which has a POW! WOW! mural] gives free haircuts to kids. These guys are working every day, making people look fresh, making people look good. That is a service to our community. A barbershop. I am here to talk with the property owner to say, look, let’s do this because your business has kids and families coming up. But when we’re doing this, let’s have a conversation. Is your lease secure? What is your future plan for your landlord? If you’re going to paint walls, ask the important questions and don’t just paint someone’s wall. So a lot of the walls that you see, we’ve had this conversation.

I’m coming in here creating awareness, telling all these business owners that gentrification is coming and before it shows up, let them know we exist already, right? And that we called the shots and that when they come, you need to be part of that conversation. So it’s not just about art, it’s about us having that real conversation about the future of our neighborhood. Because we all have our business and we’re all comfortable until somebody says, I’m going to buy this and you’ve got to go and this is happening. So our culture is allowing me to go into the neighborhoods in order to prepare people to start having that conversation and get involved because I’m just coming here to paint, let you know it’s coming, prepare. Here’s some resources and let’s get to work.

Juan Carlos Araujo

• Organizations: Empire Seven Studios, POW! WOW! San Jose

• Current home: San Jose’s Japantown

• Art Education: Self-taught

• Where to see his murals: Eastridge Center, 2200 Eastridge Loop, San Jose on the lower level, Entrance C., 360 S. Railroad in San Mateo.

Five facts about Juan Carlos Araujo

• He was born in San Jose to a single mother who immigrated from Guerrero, Mexico.

• He has six siblings, but he’s one of two that still live in San Jose.

• Founded Empire Seven Studios with Jennifer Ahn in 2008, but they were evicted from that space when the land was sold for development.

• He has two chihuahuas, named Zephyr and Revs, and one of them is featured in a mural behind Downtown Dogs on South First Street.

• Empire Seven helped coordinate a new mural on South Second and San Fernando streets commemorating 25 years of the SAP Center.

Shark mural looms large over Whole Foods lot near SAP Center

by Sal Pizarro, Bay Area News Group
July 30, 2019

There’s a new shark getting a lot of attention near SAP Center, and this one doesn’t even play hockey. The stunning new mural in progress, towering over the Whole Foods parking lot on two walls of the Modera apartment building on The Alameda, has been drawing a crowd for the past week.

Created by internationally famous urban artist Nychos — known for his work featuring cross-sections and deconstructions — the eye-popping artwork, titled “Bleed Teal,” is expected to be finished in time for Modera’s grand opening event Thursday night. But even unfinished, the work is already a visual sensation, with the shark’s skeleton separated from its body and its inner anatomy exposed.

The beast’s illustrated stomach contains a few choice morsels including a California license plate, a fish skeleton, a hockey skate and stick, and even the old Anaheim Ducks mask. Talk about taking a bite out of the “Tan Jose” reputation.

So how did Nychos end up in San Jose? The San Jose Sharks reached out to Empire Seven Studios — the art enclave founded by Juan Carlos Araujo and Jennifer Ahn that’s behind the art-forward Pow! Wow! San Jose festival and several murals around the city — and Mighty Design about getting some sharks-related artwork near SAP Center. Empire Seven’s shortlist included Nychos and the Sharks approved and commissioned the piece, with Modera providing the walls for a canvas and Whole Foods allowing the art team to use its parking lot for set-up (and providing food for the artists).

Coincidentally, the Austrian-born artist was already familiar with San Jose. Nychos, who lives in the Los Angeles area, was invited to a December holiday party in San Francisco hosted by Open Austria, the country’s official presence in the Bay Area. But he stopped in San Jose on the way and met with Empire Seven and reps from the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs to talk about possibilities for bringing his work to San Jose.

“As a leading international street artist, Nychos’s ‘Bleed Teal’ mural is an outstanding addition to San Jose’s growing collection of great public art,” said Kerry Adams Hapner, San Jose’s director of cultural affairs. “It is significant that private organizations like the Sharks recognize the value of investing in art and artists to cultivate a visual fabric that instills pride and excitement in San Jose.”

POW! WOW! San Jose Was Lit

by Juxtapoz Magazine
November 13, 2017

POW! WOW! San Jose’s inaugural public art festival recently wrapped up, leaving another new city with a massive group show’s worth of enormous paintings for the public to enjoy.

The city of San Jose has a raw, DIY art community that has been supported largely by Juan Carlos Araujo and Jennifer Ahn, who have spent years programming large-scale murals around the city, and curating gallery shows at their space, Empire Seven Studios. 2017 was their golden year, the year they threw themselves into their very own festival, working tirelessly with creative partners MTCA and Universal Grammar to produce many new public art projects made all at once by some of their favorite artists, including several San Jose locals.

Once again, POW! WOW! has created an electric vibration of art-making and creative experiences for new audiences in a new city. San Jose (known for the Sharks, Silicon Valley, and that Dionne Warwick song) enthusiastically welcomed the artists to town, and perspectives shifted. Artist Lauren Napolitano said it best in an anecdotal post from the week, “To the neighbor lady who screamed on the first night about how much she did not want this mural, and then came out thanking us for the beautiful work at the end of the week... thank you. You are the reason we do this.”

As the festival trend continues to balloon and more blank walls are transformed into content to be considered, judgement will run rampant, and shifting those negative, staunch opinions is what makes art meaningful. Congrats to San Jose and the POW! WOW! crew for opening the door.

If you find yourself in San Jose, don’t miss the new work by artists who hustled hard in a mad heatwave to make these walls come alive. The lineup included Jet Martinez, Jeff Meadows, TRAV MSK, Lacey Bryant, Aaron de la Cruz, Casey Gray, Adele Renault, Robbie Api, Roan Victor, Amine Rastagr, Ricky Watts, Ben Henderson, Lauren Napolitano, Mesngr, Sean Boyles, Griffin, Ken Davis, Girafa, Jeff Gress, and me, Kristin Farr. Thank you to POW! WOW! San Jose for the wild and wonderful week.

Pow! Wow! festival murals making an impact on San Jose

by Sal Pizarro, Bay Area News Group
October 25, 2017

San Jose’s already healthy mural scene has gone to a new level thanks to Pow! Wow! San Jose, an art and music festival that’s going on all week. Artists are breathing new life into more than a dozen walls downtown, in Japantown and in East San Jose — and the locations weren’t picked by chance.

Juan Carlos Araujo of Empire Seven Studios, one of the festival’s primary sponsors, told me Wednesday that each space is representative of San Jose culture, be it art, history, food or just life.

“It’s what lives there, whatever that is,” he said. “Someone told me yesterday that here we don’t live in the shadow of San Francisco or Oakland as much as we live in our own shadow. We want to do so much with tech as our culture, but we haven’t even given our artists the opportunity to do it with their hands, to show that arts and culture live here.”

Aaron De La Cruz is working at the Lucky 7 Market on King Road, near the iconic Pink Elephant bakery. A trio of artists — Adele Renault, Casey Gray and Jet Martinez — are each working on different murals on the Poor House Studio, a banquet space next to Poor House Bistro on Autumn Street that captures the colors and spirit of the eatery’s transplanted New Orleans roots. TRAV MSK is working on a wall behind San Jose Stage, painting a graffiti-like hodgepodge of signage essential to the urban experience.

And Ricky Watts is creating a truly impressive, colorful 3-D image on the large blank wall of the shuttered Gross/Holmes Building at 45 N. First St. He’s been arriving around 6 a.m. and working until the sun goes down. The cultural connection? To me it shows the future in the heart of one of the city’s historic districts.

There are many others to see, and you can find them on a map at www.powwowsanjose.com. There’s plenty of activity left in the festival, too, including a discussion with Pow! Wow! founder Jasper Wong at Empire Seven Studios at 5 p.m. Friday, a block party from 3 to 9 p.m. Saturday at Forager and a two-hour mural bike ride starting at 11 a.m. at the Alameda Art Works.

Pow! Wow! Brings Out San Jose's Happy Side

by Gary Singh, San Jose Metro
November 1, 2017

The kids have taken over Recycle Bookstore. Figuratively, of course.

Thanks to local painters Ben Henderson and Lacey Bryant, a gigantic mural of kids on bicycles now stretches along the side of the Midtown bookstore in San Jose, the same structure that houses The Alameda ArtWorks.

Each of the children have a happy expression on his or her face, and the bikes come in all shapes and sizes. The mural is HUGE. Artists needed a scissor lift to accomplish most of the work, and when I arrived to interrupt their work, a version of "Everyday People" by Sly and the Family Stone softly emanated from a music player. The song seemed apt, as many of the children featured were born to local artists or community boosters.

The mural, titled "Choose Your Own Adventure," is one of many that went up last week for Pow! Wow! San Jose, a global street-art-influenced community cultural project. Headquartered in the Kaka'ako district of Honolulu, where the event regularly brings more than a hundred international and local artists together to create murals and other forms of art, Pow! Wow! has recently expanded to: Taiwan; Long Beach; Singapore; Israel; Washington, D.C.; Guam; and many other locales. San Jose hosted the global event for the first time last week.

As Bryant and Henderson worked on their mural, the Sly Stone tune nailed the scene. The mural depicts everyday people and dovetails perfectly with the preschool across the parking lot.

"So far, the dozens of parents and onlookers that came by gave us a dozen different responses," Henderson said, adding that the Pow! Pow! brand dramatically elevated the project, much more than if it were just some local impresario trying to commandeer the whole thing.

This seemed true. While we talked, an intermittent but steady stream of people wearing shirts from various Pow! Wow! events—San Jose, Long Beach and other locales—walked up and took photographs. Some carried printed map booklets in hand, while others blasted Instagram shots like there was no tomorrow.

Farther down the building, as the parking lot gave way to a back alley, just past the doorway of Alameda ArtWorks, another local muralist, MESNGR, was painting a separate mural. This one, titled "Catch 22," depicted a graffiti-stained VTA bus, Route 22, plowing down the road, jalopy style, with the Sharks mascot at the wheel. Several cartoony characters, including a skater doofus and a roller derby girl, are racing the bus down the street. As the artist worked on the lettering, Slayer's "Mandatory Suicide" blasted from a music player sitting on the scissor lift, a tune that somehow perfectly fits the 22, at least if you ask regular riders.

Last week, many other murals popped up around town, most of which are here to stay. Over in Japantown, Empire 7 Studios, one of the main organizers of Pow! Wow! San Jose, hosted several artists, local as well as from out of town. Down the road, Nichi Bei Bussan on Jackson Street provided a wall for another artist. Next door to Poor House Bistro, three sides of the Poor House Studio building are now covered with separate murals. Many others now grace various buildings in downtown San Jose.

As the week unfolded, I infiltrated several Pow! Wow! events. Founder Jasper Wong flew in from Hawaii to talk about how it all started and how he found common ground with indigenous communities angry about his use of the term "pow wow." At Forager on South First Street, a hip-hop event took place with drone footage of the murals projected behind the stage as people performed.

On the last day, back in the parking lot beside Recycle Bookstore, Carlos Velazquez led approximately 90 bicyclists on a tour of all the murals. Everyone gathered in the parking lot, psyched to hit the road and see the colorful goods.

Alicia Forbrich, who owns the Alameda ArtWorks building, was one of those participating in the ride. As we stood there, she gushed about Bryant and Henderson's artwork. "It's a mural that just makes people happy," she said. "Everyone loves it. The children love it, the tenants love it, everyone's happy."

Pow! Wow! festival celebrates murals and music in San Jose

by Sal Pizarro, Bay Area News Group
October 21, 2017

Pow! Wow! San Jose will be bringing public art, nightlife and music to the forefront this week, and it’s one festival that could have a lasting impact on the city.

“What’s unusual about this festival is that the art — the murals painted simultaneously by local and global artists around the city during the week of the festival — will be displayed long after the festival is over, for as long as the buildings they are painted on are standing,” said Juan Carlos Araujo of Empire 7 Studios, which is sponsoring the festival with music production company Universal Grammar and others.

Ben Henderson, Lacey Bryant, Adele Renault, Sean Boyles and Roan Victor are among the South Bay artists who will be creating murals for the festival, which kicks off Monday with an opening ceremony at 5 p.m. at San Jose City Hall.

The week will include artists talks and music gatherings, as well as a discussion with Jasper Wong, who founded Pow! Wow! in Hawaii in 2011, on Oct. 27 at Empire Seven Studios. On Oct. 29, the festival will close with a bike ride through the streets and neighborhoods of San Jose to view the murals created throughout the week.