Dan Fontes’ “Giraphics” murals are seen in Oakland on May 3, 2026.
Amanda Bartlett/SFGATE
Dan Fontes, the Oakland artist best known for his animal murals spanning freeway underpasses, as well as the offbeat sculptures dotting the Emeryville mudflats, died Tuesday after a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 67 years old.
The Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda, where he served as a longtime board member, confirmed the news in an Instagram post this week. Fontes was “responsible for the massive wall art on both sides of our History Room that greets our patrons upon museum entry every day,” the museum wrote, as well as other murals at Musee Mecanique in Fisherman’s Wharf and Free Gold Watch, the arcade in the Haight. “Our deepest condolences go out to Dan’s longtime partner Julie [Lucchesi].”
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In an interview with SFGATE last September, when Fontes described acquiring and unearthing a collection of rare Wonderlite neon sign artwork, he said his career as a muralist traced back over 40 years. Fontes said he painted over 400 murals in the Bay Area, including “Giraphics,” a family of seven giraffes he completed in 1983 after he was inspired by the “jungle-like land tucked under the concrete maze” of I-580. “Animurals,” a series of zebras, emerged the following year.
He also claimed to be behind the tallest mural in San Francisco: “Salud! The Bethany Senior Center,” which he painted in 1997 as part of the 21st Street Mural Project in the Mission. It stretches almost 100 feet tall and 75 feet wide.
FILE – A mural titled “The Jewish Cultural Experience” by Keith Sklar, Brooke Fancher and Dan Fontes covers the north wall of a building at 1400 Franklin Street in Oakland as seen in 2009.
San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst N/Paul Chinn/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Fontes grew up by the Grand Lake Theater. After a stint on a Sausalito houseboat, he was more recently living in San Rafael, where he found a warehouse he adapted as a studio that could also store all of his beloved collectibles, including 45 pinball machines, a couple of jukeboxes and a telephone booth.
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“I’m something of a packrat,” he joked last year. “And I’ve had a strong interest in the history of California since I was a kid.”
Fontes traced his passion back to 1970s Oakland, when he was 10 years old and living on Grand Avenue. A neighbor was moving out and emptied the contents of his basement onto the curb: old pianos, furniture and photos dating back to the Civil War and the 1906 earthquake. Fontes was transfixed, obsessively looking up what he could in the encyclopedia and stashing away the treasures that didn’t get hauled off by the garbage truck.
“I was just that lucky kid who got to see all of this stuff that had been buried for decades,” he said. “It opened my eyes.”
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Dan Fontes’ “Giraphics” murals are seen in Oakland on May 3, 2026.
Amanda Bartlett/SFGATE
Dan Fontes’ “Giraphics” murals are seen in Oakland on May 3, 2026.
Amanda Bartlett/SFGATE
Dan Fontes’ “Giraphics” murals are seen in Oakland on May 3, 2026.
Amanda Bartlett/SFGATE
Fontes attended high school in both Oakland and Alameda before studying at Merritt College, later transferring to Cal State East Bay where he graduated with honors in 1981, the Oaklandside reported. Long before he became a renowned muralist, Fontes took his fascination with art and everyday objects and used it to create some of the sculptures in the Emeryville mudflats along Interstate 80.
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“After returning from a trip overseas I developed an interest in the environment which included working with Greenpeace,” he wrote on his website. “I’d been creating lots of drawings of whales and one of the first big public works I was a part of was at the Emeryville mudflats in the late 1970’s.”
Fontes crafted the towering “Lunar Lander” sculpture and the massive “Emeryville” sign out of various pieces of driftwood, both of which sparked the imaginations of countless passing commuters. Keith Lang, the owner of Rasco Manufacturing, a third-generation fabrication shop and sheet metal company in Hayward, was one of them. Lang told SFGATE in 2022 that he crafted the minion sculpture overlooking I-880 as a direct homage to the estuary oddities.
FILE – Art sculptures made from driftwood and wood scraps on the Emeryville mud flats are seen dwindling while the Emeryville skyline rises and business grow in this photo from1986.
San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst N/Jerry Telfer/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
In a GoFundMe shared in March, Lucchesi, Fontes’ partner of 28 years, revealed the artist had been in the hospital for 11 days after undergoing a “serious health crisis” and developing an abscess in his lower left lung. News of his death brought an outpouring of tributes.
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“We have lost another giant in the Bay Area art world,” fellow Oakland muralist David Burke wrote on Instagram. He recounted seeing the “Giraphics” mural for the first time from the back seat of his family’s Volkswagen station wagon in 1983, when he was eight years old. “What I couldn’t have known then was how that experience planted a seed that would quietly shape my path as an artist.”
Randall Homan and Al Barna, co-founders of SF Neon, wrote that Fontes would be “much missed by the neon community,” sharing that he ultimately donated the Wonderlite artwork he acquired to the Letterform Archive, where it is now on display. “Thankful for Dan’s generous spirit and talent.”
FILE – A mural on the Old Bank Building on Salvio St. in Concord by Dan Fontes is seen in 1997. The art depicts a street scene in the year 1894.
San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst N/MICHAEL MACOR/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Apparel company Oaklandish shared memories of reproducing his iconic giraffe and zebra murals on T-shirts back in 2009. “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 store wrote in an Instagram post.
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In his own artist’s statement, Fontes wrote that he sought “a sense of timelessness and resonance in the images I choose to make public.”
Dan Fontes’ “Giraphics” murals are seen in Oakland on May 3, 2026.
Amanda Bartlett/SFGATE
Dan Fontes’ “Giraphics” murals are seen in Oakland on May 3, 2026.
Amanda Bartlett/SFGATE
“Tired of the visual cliches and stale vocabulary of ‘the revolution’ but aligned with the principals born in the crucible of 1960’s activism era, 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,” he wrote.
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Details on a public memorial for Fontes are pending.