Free Art Friday

A few Fridays ago, I was running late hurrying up Scott street to meet some friends at Third Wheel Coffee when an envelope on the ground caught my eye: “Open me!” The envelope perched against a gold-framed print of tinned sardines, which itself leaned against a doorway painted with two koi: A mural I must have passed a hundred times, but this time distinctly fishier.

The loopy handwriting inside told me I had stumbled across a community art project stewarded by Orli B, the SF resident behind @sf.freeartfriday. Every week she hides a free piece of artwork somewhere in the city and posts a clue on Instagram for eagle-eyed San Franciscans to trace. Or in my case, to randomly come across minutes after the video is posted.

The project is new this year, inspired by a similar one in Atlanta and her growing ceramics hobby: “I was accruing things that had no place to go. And I just like injecting moments of whimsy wherever I can and so over the holiday period last year I was like, let’s do this thing.”

Orli started by sourcing artwork just from her own overflowing ceramics collection, then from artist friends, and now a quarter of her drops are from strangers just reaching out to her to contribute. She doesn’t do all the drops herself either. One Friday, she had the artist herself place the week’s piece and a couple came across it immediately: “It sounds like the couple had been having a rough go of it and then they got to find this magical little memento and the artist got to see the joy that it brought to people. And I was like, oh, there’s value in me removing myself from this. This is something that comes with community building and scaling the impact – how do I not be the bottleneck?”

Another Friday, when Orli was out of town, a neighbor placed the piece. It was a lightbulb moment: “This is a community art project, community being the operative word. I can rely and lean on others to help make this happen. People actually enjoy being a part of art in whatever capacity they can be.”

This is the heart of what Free Art Friday is all about: how easily we can brighten each others’ days. “If somebody can be like, this crazy amazing thing happened, that’s all I ever really want. Life is hard and it’s a slog and San Francisco can be difficult. So if you can inject moments of joy, it’s so worth it. You can do a small thing that makes someone’s day better, expanding the ways in which we can be good to each other.”

I took that tinned sardines print home and it lives in our living room now, right above the Lower Haight Local garage. If you’d like to contribute or learn more about Orli’s project, you can find her on Instagram @sf.freeartfriday