Know Your Street Art: "Rush Hour," Market at Seventh St.

Mike Koozmin

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• Zio Ziegler
• Visual Arts
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

During the morning and evening commutes along Market Street, thousands of people pass by a mural between Seventh and Eighth that features a wolf-like creature on the right and an intricately tattooed figure on the left. With its huge dimensions — it takes up the entire front wall of an empty lot — the mural called "Rush Hour" may be San Francisco's most widely viewed street art. It's designed to provoke, says Cannon Dill, who painted the wolf. He and the mural's two other artists (Zio Ziegler, who did the black-and-white tattooed figure, and Feral Child, who did the colorful background shapes) "approached the wall spontaneously. We weren't necessarily invited. ... The action of liberating blank spaces says more than the actual mural itself." "Rush Hour" first appeared in November 2012. It took just a few hours to complete. As Dill painted the wolf, which has human hands and is sneaking away (each wolf he draws represents someone he knows), Dill says that Market Street was "busy with all the cars and noises, which was scaring me away, so I drew the wolf crawling fast, escaping everything." Dill, Ziegler and Child had never collaborated before "Rush Hour." Now, they plan to do more street projects together — especially because works like this mural are so ephemeral. "I don't expect it to last forever," Dill says. "I like the fact that it's temporary. It will decay like everything else."