Rose D’Amato Sees the Signs

Rose D’Amato shows me a photograph she took of a recently uncovered sign, hand-painted in the 1930s, advertising six-cylinder Chevrolets on what used to be the Mission Chevrolet Co. building. In the picture, a pool of water in the neighboring construction site doubles the wall, reflecting the painting back upon itself.

“I went over the other day and someone had tagged ‘teach more history,’” says D’Amato, who is taking a break from working on her large-scale mural at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, aptly titled Mission Chevrolet. D’Amato’s Art Wall will be on view Aug. 7–Dec. 15, 2024.

She directs my attention to a video feed projected over a portion of her stenciled plans to recreate the Chevrolet sign on BAMPFA’s wall. Super 8 footage, shot by the artist, slowly excavates the now-weathered Chevrolet Six sign, layering the present and its jumbled context on her reconstruction of the sign’s past.

“This 100-year-old billboard just got exposed, and on the other side of the city kids are burning down Waymos,” D’Amato says. “Getting confronted by this huge image from the past puts this all in perspective.”

In her work, D’Amato takes that “history” tag to heart. Her paintings show a reverence for San Francisco’s past by recreating and preserving ephemeral vestiges of place. But she also embraces the live, undulating context of the city’s present. It’s an approach few pull off quite as well: honoring the past without bending to nostalgia.

The language of landscape

Rose D’Amato (who formerly worked under the name Lauren D’Amato) has called San Francisco home for the past 12 years.

Since arriving to study art at the San Francisco Art Institute, she’s been involved in many of the city’s art scenes, apprenticing at New Bohemia Signs; running her own small sign business; perfecting her form as a pin-striper; holding Kustom Sunday community nights to adorn friends’ cars, boats and windows with painted roses; and teaching hand-lettering classes at California College of the Arts for the past four years.

D’Amato is deeply attuned to the particularities of San Francisco’s signage, which lend each part of the city a distinct character. In industrial Bayview, where she lives, large, bold signs meant to be read from the freeway have a certain functionality. Many of her favorites are painted by a friend and neighbor, Bob Dewhurst. Dewhurt’s signs, D’Amato says, “are practical and utilitarian, with sharp forms that reflect that use. They look like they could be Ed Ruscha paintings.”

In pedestrian-filled neighborhoods like the Mission, a human-scale style takes precedence. “Script signs show personality in an extreme way,” D’Amato says. Her understanding of San Francisco is of a landscape filled with different visual languages — all in constant flux.

D’Amato is particularly drawn to signs that have transcended their original use. “I like liquor store signs,” she says. “The material they are painted on is acrylic so the actual substrates of the signs crack and fade quickly and they get replaced frequently. I try and pay attention to those because they are rapidly taken down.”

Sculpting words with paint

After spending a contemplative year at Headlands Center for the Arts as the 2023–2024 Tournesol Award recipient, D’Amato is at a stage of her career where she’s ready to translate her many technical skills into a singular expressive style. She’s spent a decade balancing professional sign painting with her work as an artist, and D’Amato has closely considered the nebulous filament that delineates the “decorative arts” from those “fine arts” which don’t need to be qualified. The arbitrary division is troubled by her work, which speaks both languages fluently.

This facility is currently on display in D’Amato’s two-person show at Gallery 16, Everybody Knows This Is Someplace, where her works find a fitting conversation partner in the textile canvases of fellow sign painter Jeffrey Sincich.

During the show’s opening, early evening light seeping through the gallery’s windows gave the exhibition a disorienting feeling, washing the space in a warm, blinding orange. It was difficult to surmise the perimeter of the gallery space, and this was fitting, as many of Sincich and D’Amato’s works replicate the exterior of buildings. Sincich, especially, leans into trompe l’oeil.

D’Amato’s paintings in Everybody Knows are mostly made with shades of mauve and brown and thick, black lettering. They abstract signage, doubling or patterning language in a way that sculpts words into forms free of semantic expectations. The beveled edges and layering feel revelatory, like an impressionist painter who suddenly considers cubism.

“That’s a big thing I want to do,” D’Amato says, “show signs as something separate from their actual function. Abstraction focuses on form, their beautiful hand-made aspects.” In D’Amato’s paintings, I see the exterior world atomized through her eyes, her unique way of seeing and responding to the signs of San Francisco.

Just as the artist is guiding our attention to hand-painted signs, she’s making transparent the physical labor that goes into their construction. At the Gallery 16 show, Sincich and D’Amato invited friends and fellow sign makers to exhibit their own work, underscoring the community necessary to sustaining an art practice.

Local lineages

When the Chevrolet Six billboard was exposed in December 2023, it drew immediate interest from San Francisco’s greater sign painting community. D’Amato and her friends checked in on it, marking the way its context continually changed through heavy rains and bouts of graffiti bombing. Their interest, D’Amato says, “showed me that they would have enjoyed to paint it.” At BAMPFA, she’s invited friends and fellow sign painters to letter with her, making the act of replication a communal one.

This group effort feels like a direct descendent of the work of the Mujeres Muralistas, a collective formed in 1970 by Graciela Carrillo, Consuelo Mendez, Patricia Rodriguez and Irene Perez while they were students at SFAI. They worked to expand ideas of what could constitute street murals in the Mission, insisting that alongside overtly political imagery, their depictions of beauty, both in its cultural manifestations and in portraits of women, played a radical, needed role. One of their first murals was a celebration of Pacos Tacos, now-shuttered, which the Mujeres Muralistas feared would lose business to a newly opened McDonald’s at 24th and Mission.

“We had the freedom to paint whatever we wanted,” wrote Patricia Rodriguez in an essay for Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78, “and we chose the beauty of women and their Mexican and Latino cultures.”

That group would influence another Mission artist and sign painter I can’t help but associate with D’Amato’s practice: Margaret Kilgallen. Drawing from her immediate environment, Kilgallen’s paintings are somehow both elegiac and invigorating, insisting on the presence of rapidly disappearing traditions like folk art, craft, and the hand made. Her canvases reflect genuine encounters of place, and allow the disjointed forms and juxtapositions characteristic of a city to share space in her kaleidoscopes of language.

“I love Margaret’s work,” D’Amato says, “She takes a form that already exists — like slab-style Western letters — that relates to the traditions she’s interested in and uses it to create her own image and identity.”

“It wasn’t just about signs, or typography,” D’Amato adds. “She was using them as a meeting point to talk about all the places that inspired her, the people, the subcultures. I feel like I relate to that. I’m a car enthusiast, pin-striper, a sign painter. There are meeting points.”

Recently, D’Amato decided to start going by her middle name, Rose. Rather than anything approaching a reinvention, the change holds space for the many lineages that have shaped D’Amato’s perspective, and continue to sustain her practice.

Inventing stillness

When Mission Chevrolet Co. was built, it replaced McTigue Livery, one of the city’s last saddle shops. “I wonder,” D’Amato considers, “Did the people on horses going to get saddles have the same gut-wrenching feeling as I do seeing the Waymos on the freeway?”

San Francisco is a unique battleground when it comes to technology’s encroachment on our sense of place. The city’s past is constantly circumvented by the present’s demands.

It’s human to clamor against life’s impending change — to invent stillness from a world in motion. But to actually locate that relief is rare. In D’Amato’s paintings, which reflect the city back upon itself in tripping lines of recognition, this stillness is found, in deep reserve.

Rose D’Amato’s work is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in ‘Mission Chevrolet’ Aug. 7–Dec. 15, 2024.

Her show with Jeffrey Sincich, ‘Everybody Knows This Is Someplace’ is on view at Gallery 16 (501 Third St., San Francisco) through Aug. 31, 2024.