Upstart San Francisco artists buck art-world trends and kick out brave new work at the backstreet Mule Gallery. Recent shows have featured artworks by Bay Area letterpress printers, and 'craftivism' workshops with textile artist Diana Weymar to embroider presidential tweets onto vintage children's book illustrations. Check the website for upcoming salon conversations with SF artists and activists.


Lonely Planet's must-see attractions

Nearby North Beach & Chinatown attractions

1. Beat Museum

0.05 MILES

The closest you can get to the complete Beat experience without breaking a law. The 1000-plus artifacts in this museum's literary-ephemera collection…

2. City Lights Books

0.06 MILES

No one could have predicted the cultural force City Lights would become when it first opened in 1953. Sure, it had a proletarian ethos suggested by its…

3. Jack Kerouac Alley

0.07 MILES

'The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great…' This ode by the On the Road and Dharma Bums author is embedded in his…

4. Good Luck Parking Garage

0.14 MILES

Each parking spot at this garage comes with fortune-cookie wisdom stenciled onto the asphalt: 'The time is right to make new friends' or 'Stop searching…

5. Columbus Tower

0.17 MILES

If these copper-clad walls could talk, they'd name-drop shamelessly. The tower's original occupant was political boss Abe Ruef, ousted in 1907 and sent to…

6. Bob Kaufman Alley

0.19 MILES

What's that – your hometown doesn’t have a street named after an African American Catholic-Jewish-voodoo anarchist street poet? Revered in France as the…

7. Wentworth Place

0.2 MILES

Dragons bring this shadowy brick byway roaring to life. The narrow entryway is illuminated with 'Dragon Boats Chasing Moonlight,' a new mosaic mural…

8. Ross Alley

0.21 MILES

Colorful murals hint at the colorful characters who once roamed SF’s oldest alleyway – known during the Gold Rush variously as Mexico, Spanish or Manila…