How an SF art teacher turned a Mission parking lot into a graffiti destination

Alex "Mace" Douhovnikoff stands in the back parking lot of the El Capital Hotel in the Mission. Alex "Mace" Douhovnikoff stands in the back parking lot of the El Capital Hotel in the Mission. Photo: Blair Heagerty / SFGate Photo: Blair Heagerty / SFGate Image 1 of / 25 Caption Close How an SF art teacher turned a Mission parking lot into a graffiti destination 1 / 25 Back to Gallery

Standing in the middle of the parking lot behind El Capitan Hotel in the Mission, Alex “Mace” Douhovnikoff starts to count.



“… 44, 45, 46, 47… 47,” he says, noting the number of different artists who’ve graced the wall with spray paint murals (add in basic tags and the number rises to 100).

Douhovnikoff, a Lincoln High School teacher and street artist himself, has helped transform a formerly trash-ridden lot behind an SRO into an outdoor gallery that's befitting of the building's ornate front facade (it was formerly a historic theatre).

In just the concrete breezeway between Mission Street and the parking lot, you’ll see a “battle of the bands” with music-themed murals celebrating everyone from the Grateful Dead to Jimi Hendrix to Guns N’ Roses (which Mace painted himself). Walk out back to the roughly 100 car parking lot and you’ll find a museum’s worth of street art (scroll through the slideshow above to see the best pieces).

Decked out in head-to-toe 49ers gear, Douhovnikoff couldn’t rep San Francisco harder if he tried. He’s a proud Excelsior native who started painting “little tags” in the early ‘90s and became a prolific street artist who got his “Mace” moniker when a can of pepper spray exploded on him at a party. He retired his spray paint when he met his wife and enrolled in art school, then after graduation he started teaching at Lincoln High School and re-entered the street art scene in 2010, partly thanks to his students.

“There were tags everywhere, all around the school, so I said let’s take this energy and do something with it,” says Douhovnikoff. “I took a clipboard with some blank paper and walked around at lunch talking to kids. Kids were like, ‘you’re a narc!’ But then I started drawing, and they were like, ‘ooooh.’”



It led to the creation of a club called Aerosol Art, which initially earned a $1,500 school district grant, but in recent years their funding has dried out and he currently runs the program out of his own pocket while awaiting news about the school’s budget. “I’ve been doing it for 10 years, because of my passion,” he says.

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Working with his students led him to start painting again and rebuilding his old connections within the street art community with legendary crews like TWS (“Together With Style”), TMF (“Three Mellow Fellows”) and WD (“Writers of Doom”). Now artists from those groups will call him up to let him know when they’re planning new pieces at El Capitan, which he’s been managing since around 2013 along with other sanctioned graffiti areas like Cypress Alley.

Douhovnikoff curates the spaces in conjunction with the organization Mission Art 415, which works to shift public perception of street art. City law penalizes unauthorized graffiti with a strict two-year jail sentence, which makes advocates like 415 critical to keeping neighborhood walls (legally) vibrant. They operate their own physical gallery space at 25th and Lilac Streets, as well as taking an activist role in building bridges between property managers and the street art community, transforming walls and alleys from vandalism targets into open air art museums.

Mission Art 415 was founded in 2007 by Lisa Brewer and her partner Randolph Bowes, who felt inspired to commission a mural on the outside of their apartment building in order to combat constant tagging. Brewer, who worked at a fine art gallery downtown, immediately noticed a shift in the atmosphere on the street.

“It was like, if you build it, they will come,” says Brewer. “It changed the whole topography of the place. Children were coming out playing in the streets, the neighbors started talking to each other. It was empowering to watch how not only the art, but the artists bridged that chasm of tragic crime-infected, neglected streets.”

Brewer began acting as a middle-woman between other property owners and artists, whose gruff appearances were often seen as intimidating.



“They would send me in as the front person, as this old white woman, to go in and get permission,” jokes Brewer. “And it turned into family. The artists we have, I love like family.”



She considers Douhovnikoff one of those family members. They met when he was commissioned by Bowes to do a mural on Cypress Street, which grew into a full block’s worth of art once neighbors took note. The El Capitan space began similarly, with the management of California Parking Company commissioning a small set of murals that expanded to encompass the entire lot. It’s had an incredible effect in making the space not only more lively visually, but also safer.



“There was a lot of crime and violence, especially in the evenings,” says Brewer, describing the lot behind the El Capitan Hotel. “What I've learned over the last 10 years is that if you have graffiti vandalism, which is two-color tagging, it really precipitates a lot of neglect.”

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Now, on an average day in the parking lot behind El Capitan, you’re most likely to see an international artist working on a mural than someone breaking into a car, but the lot still does have issues. They employ a security guard to keep watch for homeless encampments and some of the art has crept out of the lot and onto the fences of neighboring property owners, to their dismay.



No matter how much the team at Mission Art 415 tries to detach aerosol-based art from these types of stigmas, it’s impossible to take the “street” out of street art. But for “Mace” Douhovnikoff, projects like El Capitan help bring everyone from the community together and move the artform forward.



“Graffiti, in the nature of it, you’re not supposed to be friendly. You’re supposed to be rude, crude, and mean. Street!” says Douhovnikoff. “But in San Francisco, times have changed. We’re hippies. We embrace it. Now that other people are embracing it, it’s like, hell yeah, let’s paint!”

Dan Gentile is a digital editor at SFGATE. Email: Dan.Gentile@sfgate.com | Twitter: @Dannosphere