Hell@ Mission, a new weekly feature on our site will give you a look at the past and present Mission through the eyes of local artist Rio Yañez.
Born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission District, Yañez is a curator, photographer, and graphic artist. As a curator he is a frequent collaborator with his father, Rene Yañez. He has exhibited in cities ranging from San Francisco to Tokyo. His reimaginings of Frida Kahlo have included the Ghetto Frida Project, a series of prints, writings, and performance pieces featuring a thugged-out Kahlo. Yañez is also a founding member of The Great Tortilla Conspiracy, the world’s most dangerous tortilla art collective. In the Mission District Rio has been conceived, disbelieved, and deceived; born, adorned, and scorned, jumped, dumped, and thumped, gentrified, vilified, and country-fried; educated, ICE-raided, and translated. He makes no admission for actions in the Mission and pleads the fifth for what he’s done down 25th. Check out more of his work at rioyanez.com.
The Red Man approached me one night back in my youth as I was hanging out on 24th & Mission acting a fool and said to me pendejo!…I AM YOUR FATHER.
I haven’t been the same vato since.
great rio. i remember the red man from 20 years ago haunting 16th between mission and guerrero. he was one of a number of strange, if less iconic, characters on those blocks, though he was more unnerving than most. whenever i talked to him he was less than lucid, or maybe it was me. not surprisingly, he died, as he lived, for his art.