by YUJIE ZHOU DECEMBER 25, 2024 (MissionLocal.org)
Chestnut-backed chickadees, yellow warblers and other feathered birds have landed this winter on otherwise-unassuming green utility boxes along South Van Ness Avenue and Bryant Street in the Mission.
These 20 feathered friends are the creation of Claudio Talavera-Ballón, a Mission-based Peruvian painter sponsored by the nonprofit Paint the Void to paint 10 Mission utility boxes, part of a project to remake 250 utility boxes across San Francisco.
It’s an effort to color the utility boxes that store infrastructure for nearby traffic lights across the city. Elsewhere, dozens of artists have covered the “municipal green” boxes with pandas, a girl on the swing, and a naughty astronaut.
Talavera-Ballón’s flock, all Bay Area species, can be seen at almost every intersection on South Van Ness between 14th and 22nd streets. In the last two months, they’ve become fixtures of the Mission.
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Some birds visit their own portraits. When he started working on the tiny chestnut-backed chickadee at Bryant and 17th streets, Talavera-Ballón said, “I started seeing a lot of [chestnut-backed chickadees] in the Mission.”
He chose “the most colorful” birds to depict. It took him 10 eight-hour days to finish the renderings — sometimes longer, if he needed to erase and redraw the eye. The latter, he said, is the key to bringing a bird to life. “If you see the eyes of the bird, the birds are watching you,” said Talavera-Ballón.
The yellow warbler at the corner of South Van Ness and 22nd is a bird with yellow and black stripes that migrates between California and South America. When they were in town, they congregated in the large pomelo tree in Talavera-Ballón’s backyard.
And now, they are gone. “Somebody cut the tree,” he explained. Afterwards, the birds, which are important predators of pests, never returned to his backyard.
“Everything is in concern of extinction,” said Talavera-Ballón, who chose birds as his subject partly to raise awareness about the climate, pollution and animals.
Plus, “everybody likes birds,” he said.
Turns out he was right; the 20 birds got zero bad reviews, a rarity in San Francisco as far as anything goes.
He had an audience of onlookers while he painted. He remembered three little boys of nearly identical faces and different ages who watched him with their mouths open and their heads tilted to the side
When he worked on the utility box at South Van Ness and 14th, a young lady hugged him, cried like a child and thanked him over and over, said Talavera-Ballón. She said the bird — either a black phoebe or a western wood pewee — reminded her of her father, and she said, “You don’t know what the bird means to me.”
“This is my payment,” said Talavera-Ballón who, like other artists, receives $800 per utility box.
Talavera-Ballón, 50, has been an artist since childhood, when his mom constantly encouraged him to paint. He sometimes had to “choose between [drawing] materials and food;” he always chose the former. “Everybody can bring me food, but not everybody can bring me a crimson alizarin,” he said.
He’s also the creator of large-scale mural projects at 25th and Mission streets, the Salesforce Transit Center, and others in Redwood City and Oaxaca, Mexico.
The utility-box murals were intended to deter taggers. Two months into the completion, however, many of Talavera-Ballón’s birds have already been defaced with graffiti.
Still, he finds joy in painting them: “Give me all the boxes in the Mission.”
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YUJIE ZHOU
REPORTER. Yujie Zhou came on as an intern after graduating from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She is a full-time staff reporter as part of the Report for America program that helps put young journalists in newsrooms. Before falling in love with the Mission, Yujie covered New York City, studied politics through the “street clashes” in Hong Kong, and earned a wine-tasting certificate in two days. She’s proud to be a bilingual journalist. Follow her on Twitter @Yujie_ZZ.More by Yujie Zhou
