Dan Fontes, one of Oakland’s most celebrated muralists, best known for his murals depicting wild animals on freeway underpasses, died on Tuesday, April 28, at the age of 67.
Fontes was born in Oakland in 1958 and grew up here, attending schools in both Oakland and Alameda. After high school, he went on to Merritt College, then transferred to Cal State East Bay (then Cal State Hayward), where he graduated with honors in 1981.
His partner Julie Lucchesi announced on March 8 on GoFundMe that Fontes was home recovering after suffering a health emergency that landed him in the hospital for 11 days with an abscess in one of his lungs. She later posted that he’d been hospitalized again on March 22.
The Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda where Fontes had served on the board of directors, and where several of his smaller scale murals are on display, confirmed the news on Tuesday night. The announcement said that he had died after a battle with cancer.
One of Fontes’ iconic giraffes on a column beneath the I-580 near Oakland and Harrison streets. Credit: Pete Rosos for The Oaklandside
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Oakland muralist David Burke was one of the first to announce the news on social media, writing, “We have lost another giant in the Bay Area art world.” Burke, who credits Fontes as his inspiration for making art in large public spaces, posted a moving tribute.
“I first encountered the Giraffix mural beneath the 580 freeway in 1983 when I was eight years old,” Burke wrote in the post. “Seeing this majestic giraffe from the back seat of our Volkswagen station wagon, I remember the magic of seeing that beautiful creature & the way it stopped time for a moment. What I couldn’t have known then was how that experience planted a seed that would quietly shape my path as an artist.”
Other tributes poured in honoring Fontes’s legacy.
“RIP to the legendary muralist @danfontesart whose Giraphics, Animurals, and so many more pieces of public art raised generations of Oakland kids with generous environmental activism,” the Oakland apparel company Oaklandish wrote in an Instagram post. “We were honored to reproduce one of his giraffes on tees way back in 2009 and then zebras after that. We always meant to reconnect and work together again, we just never thought that time would run out so quickly. Thank you for being so kind, and an inspiration to so many of us.”
“I met Dan years ago and also poured out my love and admiration for his work,” Oakland artist Jet Martinez commented in Burke’s post on Instagram. “He was truly a kind and generous artist. A real role model and one hell of a painter.”
From left to right: muralists Pancho Pescador, David Burke, and Dan Fontes in front of Burke and Pescador’s mural “Love Letter to Oakland” in 2022. Credit: courtesy of David Burke
Over the course of his career as a muralist, Fontes painted dozens of public murals around the Bay Area, including the “Giraphics” mural, completed in 1983, on Oakland and Harrison streets beneath I-580.
One of his other wildlife murals in Oakland is the 1984 project “Animurals,” which was restored in 2016. In the years since, the mural has endured years of tagging, leaving its zebras barely visible.
Much of his work spoke to his environmental activism, honored Bay Area history, and represented Oakland’s vibrancy including the “Montclair Duck Pond,” the “Oakland Gems” which depicted landmarks like the Camron-Stanford House, and the Grand Lake Theatre. Also, the “Emergent Sea Turtles” near 23rd Avenue and I-880.
“I seek a sense of timelessness and resonance in the images I choose to make public,” Fontes wrote in an artist’s statement. “I’ve chosen to continue the struggle down an unchartered path to fight blight, sameness and visual bleakness and depressing grayness of the cities within a palette of springtime brightness, color intensity and photographic beauty.”
His public murals weren’t limited to the East Bay. In 1997, Fontes painted “Salud! The Bethany Senior Center,” as part of the 21st Street Mural Project in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood. In talking to SFGATE about this project, Fontes said that he interviewed, sketched and photographed 15 seniors who lived at the apartment complex. The mural is still visible on the side of the building.
Fontes was known for rallying financial support from community members who were fans of his work to help pay for restorations. Fontes restored the “Giraphics” mural in 1994 and again in 2016.
Fontes also fought for the rights of muralists to preserve their work. In 2014, he sued the operators of the former Autocom Nissan on 27th Street and Broadway, seeking $400,000 in damages for the company’s decision to paint over a striking, colossal Lake Merritt landscape he had painted in 1987.
Intellectual property attorney Brooke Oliver, who represented Fontes at the time, told KQED when the lawsuit was filed, “This is Dan Fontes’ baby. It’s his best work. And it’s hard to imagine how anyone can look at a piece of art like that and just want to paint it out.” Oliver cited the U.S. Visual Artist Rights Act, a 1990 copyright law that requires the owner of a building with a large-scale mural to give the artist 90-days’ notice before a work is removed or painted over.
The following year, the parties entered into a confidential settlement.
Fontes never stopped inspiring younger muralists like Burke who followed in his footsteps — just as Richmond-based artist John Wehrle and Oakland-based artist Daniel Galvez had inspired Fontes, as mentioned in his artist’s statement.
When Burke was working on the second in his monumental series “Love Letter to Oakland” alongside artists Pancho Pescador and Joevic Yeban — a mural in Temescal that honors the late conductor Michael Morgan and artist Hung Liu — Fontes would stop by to check on their progress
“I am grateful to have had the opportunity to share with Dan the profound impact he had made, not only on me, but on an entire generation of young artists finding their way,” Burke wrote in a tribute.
No announcement has yet been made about a public memorial.
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