Take a Beautiful Tour of All the Public Art in the Bay Area

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You can live in a city all your life and only see about 1 percent of its hidden beauty. That's the message one could easily draw from this crowd-sourced caboodle of public art in the Bay Area, which includes everything from a 1930s beach-chalet mural to a bronze Willie Mays to "Kittenzillas" shooting lasers from their eyes to a tiny Statue of Liberty on Alcatraz.

The staggering work of cartography was assembled by local software whiz Nancy Milholland – art lover, ESRI enthusiast, ordained Episcopal priest, and proud owner of a hound. It was the latter facet of Milholland's life that pushed her to create the "San Francisco Public Art Map," a finalist in a recent mapping competition in Berkeley. She writes:

As a San Francisco dog owner, I often walk my terrier at Fort Funston. At the ocean’s edge, by a crumbling concrete structure, are various artworks celebrating dogs. A bas-relief sculpture depicts running greyhounds. A ceramic work shows a dog Buddha gazing out to sea. Who created these pieces and why? I wanted to know the story behind these artworks.

When Milholland went looking for information in the city's spatial dataset for public art, she discovered that some locations were wrong by a matter of miles. Other artworks had been excluded because they were not publicly funded, forming a blind spot in the official records for street art, privately funded installations, and murals that random people had thrown up.

So she decided to throw her net far and wide and forge a more comprehensive guide to the city's visual allure. Her map draws from a variety of official and curated sources (the municipal planning department and arts commission, the SF Mural Arts program) and more lawless treasure troves like Flickr, Instagram, and YouTube. The glittering mix of artistic gems she's accumulated includes not just standard "art," but lovely bits of architecture, historically important buildings, and pleasing panoramas from digital photographers, like this soulful shot of the San Francisco skyline:

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