Not everybody has a father who once slathered his own, near-naked body head to toe with thick motor grease for a performance piece. Not everybody has a father who came home covered in chalk that turned the bath water black, while his gleeful boys counted the bucketful of coins he collected in his new career making pavement art.

Since the artist, whose real name was Bob Guillemin, died on Monday at age 75, his twin sons, Rob and John, have been playing back the reel of their extraordinary upbringing.


In 1971, when he was 7, Rob helped smuggle his father’s art into an MFA bathroom for a guerilla group show protesting the museum’s seeming disinterest in local and contemporary artists. When Bob took his boys to official exhibitions at the MFA, he’d strike up conversations with people about the works, collecting a dozen strangers over the course of a visit.

“People would leave feeling like something magical had just happened,” said John.

Giving people that feeling was Sidewalk Sam’s life’s work. He was not just an artist: He was a social activist, springing to prominence at a time when a broken city desperately needed more magic. Working with him, his sons came to know their father’s real vocation: It wasn’t the pictures themselves, but the personal connections that formed around them.

Rob remembers working with his father on a piece in the summer of 1974, when he was 10. A homeless friend of Bob’s came by and started chatting about the work. A gray-haired, distinguished-looking man stopped to say hello, too, and he and the other man got into a spirited discussion about whatever masterpiece the artist was reproducing that day. The gray-haired man, it turned out, was Mayor Kevin White.


“See, that’s the power of art,” Rob remembers his father saying, after the men left. The point was to bridge divides. It didn’t matter if critics were impressed, or if it all washed away in the next day’s rain.

Guillemin, born in Dayton, Ohio, came from a family of academic stars. He got degrees in fine arts, and had success, his works appearing at the Rose Art Museum and at the Institute of Contemporary Art. But that kind of acclaim felt hollow to him.

“Maybe you could argue the [street] art itself isn’t that great,” Rob said. “In many cases, it’s copying things, or simplistic, not associated with powerful political statements. Maybe you could argue that it’s like making balloon animals on a corner.”

So what, his father would have said. As long as it draws people together, even if just for a moment.

At that, he was phenomenally successful, he and his second wife, Tina, pulling off some spectacular civic events. For Earth Day in 1990, they recruited an army of volunteers to paint a one-mile stretch of Storrow Drive to make it look like the meadow it once was. They organized a summer festival in 1991 that put art and poetry on telephone poles and parking meters, and in spots all over the city, drawing in 1,800 works from acclaimed artists and from lesser-known ones who called a shelter or a convent home.

Hoping to ease the racial tension that followed the murder of Carol Stuart by her husband, Charles, who tried to pin it on a nameless black man, the couple had 40,000 Boston schoolchildren work on a giant mural showing kids of different races embracing. And when people were falling to gun violence in the neighborhoods, Sidewalk Sam had volunteers draw doves on the city’s streets.


“He had faith,” said John, “that all you had to do was remind people of their basic goodness and wonderful things would happen.”

His optimism was so relentless that it could seem unreal; it took time even for Tina to realize how genuine he was.

“There was some spark in him that was so generous of spirit,” she said. His optimism could not be shaken, even when he fell off a roof and was paralyzed in 1994. That spirit — together with his considerable charm — was useful when it came to convincing banks to underwrite projects, or persuading people who believed they couldn’t draw a straight line to pick up some chalk and amaze themselves.

Almost all of Sidewalk Sam’s works are gone now. That is how he wanted it.

His real art was the magic that can happen between strangers. That remains, long after the chalk has washed away.

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @GlobeAbraham.