Rigo 23 is a Portuguese-born Americanmuralist, painter, and political artist. He is known in the San Francisco community for having painted a number of large, graphic "sign" murals including: One Tree next to the U.S. Route 101 on-ramp at 10th and Bryant Street, Innercity Home on a large public housing structure, Sky/Ground on a tall abandoned building at 3rd and Mission Street, and Extinct over a Shell gas station. He resides in San Francisco, California.
Early life and education
Rigo was born in 1966 and raised on the island of Madeira in Portugal. In his youth he joined Center for Cultural Action in Funchal and connected with older artists. Rigo arrived in San Francisco in 1985, using the name Rigo 85. He earned a BFA degree from San Francisco Art Institute in 1991, and an MFA degree from Stanford University in 1997. From 1984 until 2002, Rigo used the last two digits of the current year as part of his name, finally settling upon "23" in 2003.
Career
San Francisco murals
Rigo is one of the founding members of Clarion Alley Mural Project collective in 1992 and is still an active member, as of 2017. He is considered by some art critics and curators to be part of the first generation of the San Francisco Mission School art movement. Many of Rigo's 20+ murals are located in the South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco. The first of a series of San Francisco murals, the forty foot tall shield-shaped street sign mural "Innercity Home" is located in the Tenderloin neighborhood and can be seen from a distance when entering the city on the freeway. The San Francisco pop art mural "One Tree" was one of his more iconic works, it was located near a freeway ramp at 10th and Bryant streets and featuring a mural of a street sign pointing to a single tree which grew nearby. In 2012, additional trees were planted near the mural which had previously featured only a single tree, and by 2017, the mural was deconstructed, cut and moved to point the pointing sign to the freeway ramp.
Political art
Rigo's artwork has highlighted world politics and political prisoners, from the Black Panthers and the Angola Three to Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose conviction for the murder of a policeman is contested, and the American Indian Movement's Leonard Peltier. Rigo create a controversial statue of Peltier that was removed from the grounds of the American University in January 2017. In 2005, he created a statue based on the 1968 Olympics Black Power salute titled Victory Salute, a twenty-two foot tall monument of two men: Tommie Smith and John Carlos. In the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, these men each raised a black-gloved fist for human rights. Their simple gesture of the hand is considered as one of the most controversial statements of political and social activism in Olympic history. Victory Salute is a monument of that moment which was specifically built on the San Jose State University campus because Smith and Carlos were both student-athletes at the college.
