This is The Looker, a column about design and style from San Francisco Standard editor-at-large Erin Feher.
The best things about a city are its secrets. For every attention-grabbing building that declares its importance — museums sheathed in perforated copper, towers that twist or taper or are topped with colorful LED screens — there is a humble, aging structure hiding something spectacular.
The blond and battered masonry building on Mission Street, out well past the numbered streets where it bleeds into Bernal Heights, is one such place. Once you enter the unmarked steel door in the rear, it’s clear something special is happening here. The wide and sloping corridor is crowded with plywood sheets and rolls of paper and canvases in various states of artistic transmogrification.
The interior hallway doors that lead into the various building units were liberated from a mix of homes, barns, and churches, hinting at the personalities and talents that reside behind them. The first door is painted a weathered turquoise and marked with a constellation of 23s in various fonts and styles. But nothing can prepare you for the explosive combination of life and art that you encounter once you step inside.
This is the home and studio of artist Isaac Vazquez Avila, a painter and sculptor whose uncategorizable work has graced everything from gallery walls to tech offices to billboards. His space is a real-life version of the treehouse hideout you designed in your mind when you were 9. Inside the soaring double-height loft, a 20-foot-tall wood ladder leads to various levels of platforms, crawl spaces, and catwalks. Bright green leaves and feathery ferns hang from rafters strung with colored Christmas lights. A winding stair, each tread painted a different color, leads up and up, revealing more mystery rooms and cubbies. A taxidermied pheasant swoops, wings spread, through the room. Hundreds of paintbrushes bloom from cups and jars. Caddies overflow with every possible color of pastel. Tables are set with glue, saws, drills, and spray paint. Rolls of tape in every width and purpose hang from hooks on the wall. A wood lathe is parked in one corner, protected by a box of plexiglass to keep wood shavings from flying into the freshly painted canvases.
And for every tool or tube of paint, there is a work of art realized. Dozens of Vazquez Avila’s artworks, both in-process and complete, line the walls and sit on every surface: chunky, raw-wood sculptures; finely rendered paintings and pastel drawings; works on paper, board, canvas, and fabric.
“I’ve always wanted this kind of connection to my practice,” says Vazquez Avila about his space. Whether it was setting up a studio in his bedroom in a shared Haight Street apartment, or convincing a landlord to rent him a chunk of windowless storage space in a Potrero Hill rental, he has always worked with little separation between art and life.
Vazquez Avila is quiet and thoughtful, and much like the way he lives, he puts up few walls between himself and the world. He’s creatively guided by instinct and intuition — traits inherited from his mother, who found small moments to make things with her hands during long and busy workdays. Vazquez Avila was born in Mexico City and immigrated at age 5 to Salt Lake City — a location chosen because there were a pair of janitorial jobs waiting there for his parents.
He fondly recalls a safe and solid childhood, but by 21, he was itching for a change. A romance was his ticket out of Utah, and in 2004, he accepted the invitation of a crush who offered to share her Lombard Street apartment.
“It wasn’t until I lived in San Francisco that I realized being an artist was a thing,” recalls Vazquez Avila. When the relationship ended, he moved into a Haight Street house that was a hive of creativity. “It was full of artists, and we all had our studios in our rooms.”
He was sufficiently inspired to enroll at San Francisco State in his late 20s and finish up his undergraduate degree in Latino/a studies. After graduation, he applied for the highly competitive — and tuition-free — MFA program at UC Berkeley. “It was like hitting the jackpot,” Vazquez Avila says of landing one of six coveted spots. “I don’t know how much it actually costs to go to Berkeley, but I know it was not in my ballpark.”
He spent the next two years on campus, studying, working in the studio provided by the program, and building relationships with fellow artists who would shape the next phase of his life. One of those was Matt Smith Chavez, who was a year ahead of him in the program and working and living out of a Bernal Heights warehouse that had been purchased by small and scrappy artist collective. An artist was moving out, and Vazquez Avila was offered the spot.
He moved into his studio in 2017 and has been immersed in his practice ever since, creating an expansive body of work that has earned him dozens of exhibitions, including three solo shows at Oakland’s Pt. 2 Gallery. He is currently preparing for three upcoming shows, including “Same Blue as the Sky,” a biennial celebrating Northern Californian artists that runs concurrent with San Francisco’s FOG Design + Art fair in January.
In addition to Vazquez Avila’s proliferating body of work, the loft also houses orphaned artworks and tools left behind by the artists who came before him — a time capsule of the creativity that brought this compound into existence in the first place. The building was erected in 1926 as The People’s Dairy, where hundreds of glass bottles of milk were filled and loaded up for delivery each day. It was an attention-grabber back then, with a ten-foot-tall milk bottle perched on its roof.
Artists started taking over the rear-half of the building in the early 1980s, renting the space from the then-owners Ross Dove Auctioneers. A Nicaraguan cake shop occupied the Mission-facing storefront space. According to one of the current owners, in 2011, a group of tenants negotiated a deal with the third generation of the Dove family to purchase the building. It has been jointly owned ever since by a motley group of bakers and artists, its residents toiling away on projects as varied as towering chair sculptures, petite butterfly portraits, and multi-tiered wedding cakes filled with guava jelly.
The ground floor of Vazquez Avila’s is dedicated solely to making, with paint and pastels taking over the two main tables. Toward the wall of original windows — a few of them shattered and taped in place — is a shelf displaying half a dozen sculptures, surrounded by an impressive collection of tools. A different section of the room is lined with rulers and stencils used for sign making, another of Vazquez Avila’s mediums, and one that helps pay the bills between shows.
A kitchen is set on a stage-like platform on one end of the space. One wall painted Marian blue, a tone of ultramarine named for the robes of the Virgin Mary, is altar-like with a collection of sculptures, found items, dried flowers, and petite framed portraits. A windowless cubby was constructed next to the kitchen and serves as a bedroom. A previous tenant meticulously lined the ceiling with narrow strips of wood, lending the cozy room the aura of a modern Japanese sauna.
The curving, multicolored stairs continue up to yet another room, but not before offering another option, the makeshift step ladder splitting off to an elevated platform over the studio space where Vazquez Avila stretches and stores his blank canvases. Up the stairs is an office and closet, blasted with sun through an ancient skylight, and a quirky bathroom space lined in bright yellow tiles. Art — his own and that of friends — is everywhere.
For Vazquez Avila, this special corner of Mission Street represents the San Francisco he fell in love with 20 years ago — the one that still offers up unconventional ways to exist for all different kinds of dreamers. It still has plenty of secrets to share with those willing to listen.