The sidewalk kiosks along San Francisco’s Market Street have carried art for decades. Most people pass them at walking speed. For Pride 2024, one of them, at Market and 6th Street, was opened up and hung floor to ceiling with Terry Bauer’s work.
Kiosk art on Market Street
There is more than one kind. The San Francisco Arts Commission, with SFMTA and Clear Channel, has commissioned new artworks for street kiosk posters every year since 1992. A separate program, kiosk activation, is a collaboration between the City and County of San Francisco, San Francisco Public Works and JCDecaux, whose news kiosks they are.
Unstaged and the Mid-Market block party
Event listings describe Unstaged as a free block party on Market Street between 5th and 6th, with live bands, DJs, makers and interactive art.
In 2024 CounterPulse, the San Francisco arts nonprofit, put out a paid call for artists to activate a kiosk at Market and 6th, by Blick Art Supplies, for the Unstaged evening on November 7. Its call carried a photograph of a kiosk that had already been done: Terry’s, for Pride.
The Pride 2024 kiosk
The photograph above is that kiosk. Both doors are open. A psychedelic skull banner hangs at the back, faces and abstracts cover the walls, and racks of prints and small paintings fill the sides. More paintings are fixed to the insides of the doors, at knee height, where a passer-by looking down would meet them. There is a chair in the middle.
A kiosk is a hard place to show work. It is small, it is outdoors and nobody comes to it on purpose. People pass it on the way to somewhere else. Work that reads from across a sidewalk, in daylight, at a glance, holds up there. Bold colour and a strong silhouette do; fine detail waits for those who stop.
CounterPulse and the city’s other walls
Terry has worked with CounterPulse in San Francisco, a nonprofit hub for experimental artists, through collaborative exhibitions and installations from 2023 to 2025.
His work has also hung in the Tenderloin’s Angel Café, in pop-ups there in 2024, at Mr. Hyde’s Hair Salon in a featured local artist series the same year, and at Barberology. In 2017 he showed in The Art of Star Wars, a pop-up with R. Crumb and other Bay Area artists.
The pattern is the same as the kiosk: art in the places people already are, rather than only in the white rooms they visit for it. A café wall, a salon mirror, a barbershop and a news kiosk all have one thing in common. The audience didn’t plan to see art that day, and saw it anyway.
Why it matters to a collector
Seeing work in the street tells you something a gallery wall doesn’t: how a piece reads from a distance, in changing light, next to everything else a city puts in front of you. If a work held its own on Market Street, it will hold its own in a hallway. And it tells you the artist is out in the city with the work, not only online.
Seeing kiosk art in person
For the commissioned poster program, the Arts Commission’s pages list current and past artists. For Unstaged and other kiosk events, the organisers’ own listings carry the dates, which change from season to season.
Where to go next
The about page lists the shows and collaborations in full, with years. To ask about a show, a collaboration or a piece like the ones on the kiosk walls, use the inquiry page: it takes a question about a work, an exhibition or a collaboration in one message.