Mona Caron is a San Francisco-based artist, engaging in muralism & street art, illustration, art-ivism, and photography. Her focus is on community-informed and site-specific public art . She has created murals in the US, throughout South America and in Europe, creates stop-motion mural animations, has freelanced as an illustrator, and engages in artivism with social and environmental movements.
Today, she lives around the corner from one of her first murals: Market Street Railway, located at Church and 15th streets.
Painted in 1998, the Duboce Bikeway Mural was actually her first. Market Street Railway, which debuted in June 2004, came next.
Mona creates art for street actions and graphics in accompaniment of social and environmental justice movements, local and international. Her art has been used in climate justice movements, water rights, and labor rights groups with organizations including 350.org, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Zero-waste Detroit, US Social forum, La Coordinadora por el Agua y la Vida and Fundación Abril of Cochabamba Bolivia, Acción Ecologica (Ecuador), Land is Life, among others, as well as with urban commons and bicycle advocacy groups of bicycle coalitions of cities on 3 continents, to several World Bicycle Forums.
Mona has been focussing primarily on murals in public space since the beginning of the millennium. Her goal is to activate public space by simultaneously creating artwork and interactive street happenings, using the painting’s narratives to spark conversations and critical awareness of the space we share.
Mona’s first period in muralism was defined by very site-specific and community-immersive narrative murals, reflecting the past, present, and future imaginaries of their neighborhoods through a uniquely permeable participatory process, considered part of the artwork. Mona’s community process has been the subject, among other publications, of an Emmy-winning documentary film by Paige Bierma.
The San Francisco-based artist often partners with local and international social and environmental movements for climate justice, labor rights, and water rights, and selects plants, both native and invasive, that she finds in the cities where she paints. Caron also integrates tiny details into the main visual elements of her murals:
“Several of these murals contain intricate miniature details, invisible from afar. These typically narrate the local history, chronicle the social life of the mural’s immediate surroundings, and visualize future possibility, and are created in a process that incorporates ideas emerging through spontaneous conversations with the artwork’s hosting communities while painting.”
Caron regularly shares process videos and photos of completed works on Instagram, and she delves into the narratives behind several of her murals on her website.
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