Seeing Spirits of Silicon Valley in Place

Public art appears in many forms, quite commonly as statues and ornamentation for public buildings such as court houses, other government buildings, libraries, and schools. Religious communities also typically share public art, both in statues of religious leaders, saints, and other holy people and in the architecture of houses of worship. Such artworks add to the aesthetic  sense of place  of a particular city or town, often serving as landmarks that communicate more or less subtly about the history, identity, and social character of a place. They materialize public memory.

But more quotidian public artworks also make aesthetic, cultural, historical, and moral claims on a landscape, balancing the official representations of civic and religious institutions with visual expressions from the lives of ordinary people, including their religious and spiritual experiences and perspectives. This is certainly the case in San José, California, the heart of a region typically seen as robustly secular with its high tech corporate bohemoths and aspirational incubators. Despite the corporate orientation of Silicon Valley, it is marked by tremendous religious and spiritual creativity across the diverse neighborhoods of the city. Indeed, Santa Clara Country, the center of Silicon Valley, is one of the  most religiously diverse counties  in the United States.

"Mural paining as community expression, involving local residents, passersby, and onlookers, is an original contribution to the art form begun in the United States in the 1960s."

Though often overlooked, murals are among the most culturally, socially, politically, and often religiously complex forms of public art. They are particularly important in understanding the  lifeworlds  of different communities in that, historically at least, they are grassroots productions, typically created by local, often self-trained artists in collaboration with local residents and community organizations. This is certainly the case with the majority of murals Silicon Valley, many of which have documented the origin stories, challenges and triumphs, heroes and saints, dreams and hopes of residents in the diverse neighborhoods of the Valley.

"Murals," the artist, critic, and activist  Lucy Lippard  reminds us, "are primarily intended for the community that lives with them" (1988:xi). That is, they differ from many other aesthetic productions in that they are, quite literally, grounded in the history and experience of particular people and places. Whatever universal artistic qualities murals certainly contain, they most actively engage the people who see them, even just in passing, directly in the emplaced contexts of their everyday experience. As Holly Barnet Sanchez and Tim Drescher explain, "Mural paining as community expression, involving local residents, passersby, and onlookers, is an original contribution to the art form begun in the United States in the 1960s" (2016: xxii).

Thus, the local individuals, community groups, and small businesses that ornament Silicon Valley with visually engaging, sometimes provocative, graffiti, murals, and other street art make their own, unique contributions to the sense of place of the region. As with more formal public artworks, neighborhood murals materialize shared memories of specific communities with specific shared histories, in specific geographies. The memories and histories of communities often expand or contest the "official record" of life in a particular place by adding stories of ordinary people that are often ignored or forgotten.

"Murals are relatively short-lived," Lippard explains, "and since urban neighborhoods change rapidly, image and context can be forced into dissidence—when, for instance, a militantly ethnic neighborhood falls to gentrification, leaving behind its images of cultural pride and class politics for new people to whom they may be offensive or quaint" (Ibid., xiii). As Silicon Valley is reshaped by forces of corporate development like the  Google Transit Village  project (known locally as "Googleville"), for instance, a fading, partially preserved mural in the Spartan-Keyes neighborhood, remembers a restaurant that offered food with "the incomparable flavors of  Zinapécuaro, Michoacán ," a town in central Mexico. For immigrants from the region, the mural is more than an advertisement. It is a memory of home unlikely to be preserved in more formal public forms.

Local individuals, community groups, and small businesses ornament Silicon Valley with visually engaging, sometimes provocative, graffiti, murals, and other street art that make their own contributions to the sense of place of the region. But, as with formal public art, neighborhood artworks like murals materialize shared memory in the context of specific communities with specific shared histories, in specific geographies.

In the case of public art that is religious or spiritual in nature—the focus of the sites shared here—the claim on the landscape is more than territorial. When a neighbor in  Shasta-Hanchett Park , for instance, chalks an affirmation on "living life" on sidewalk stones outside her home, taking care to brush away leaves so the words written carefully in two different colors can be easily seen by passersby, she is sharing an invitation to pause, to briefly reflect on life, to consider the beauty and meaning created even— perhaps especially—by the cracks we come across on the path. Indeed, the attentive neighbor or visitor who pauses at these paving stones will be rewarded by even richer affirmations in the small print at the bottom of the cracked slab: "living," "have faith," "thrive," "thrive."

We cannot know the artist's specific motivation, of course. But it is certainly the case that the time, care, creativity, and cleverness of this humble public art installation offers a different take on the ethos of Silicon Valley than those portrayed in the halls of government, business, and media. Likewise, the chalked paving stones are the beginning of a conversation, and therefore a relationship, that may extend to face-to-face engagement. In this sense, they are social media of the decidedely analog sort, offering an alternative to the digital modes of connection and communication famously offered by Silicon Valley corporations.

Other spiritual claims are made on the Silicon Valley landscape through public art, these often correcting the historical and religious record, in the process calling forth supressed or hidden political and ethical perspectives. The location of Lauren Napolitano's "Rise Above" mural—the first stop on the map tour below—is not incidental to its aesthetic, cultural, and moral significance. The mural is on the wall of a  community program  that provides food and nutrition services to people living with HIV/AIDS as well as formerly unhoused people. The building is directly behind St. Leo Catholic Parish, among the earlier churches of American California, and a beneficiary of the occupation of Indigenous lands by Spanish colonists and missionaries. The mural makes an Indigenous claim on a neighborhood named for the church, elevating Indigenous images and symbols and offering alternative forms of encouragement and hope to people—those with HIV/AIDS, those without stable homes—who are often erased from conventional histories of Silicon Valley, San José, and California. It is an elegant, uncontroverial image on the surface with, arguably, profoundly subversive spiritual, moral, and political meanings upon closer examination.

The map below provides a visual tour of some of these sites, highlighting the work of professional artists as well as ordinary neighborhood residents. The sites highlighted on the map tour are among dozens of murals and other forms of street art in San Jose that do a range of work in their communities. They articulate ethnic, racial, and cultural identity. They re-present cultural histories and heritages for new generations. They share stories of oppression and liberation, and highlight social issues that continue to challenge residents of many San José neighborhoods. And, particularly when they include expressly religious concent, the murals of San Jose mark neighborhoods and their residents as sacred places. They invoke the presence of gods and goddesses and call on the powers of divine and natural spirits for protection, healing, and power. They remember and honor ancestors and celebrate the gifts and possibilities of the living. They do the work that is typically associated with formal, institutional religions in the ordinary contexts of everyday life—in neighborhood cafés and restaurants, schools, convenience stores, parks, fences, sidewalks, and bridge walkways.

We invite you to tour the murals in San José with us, both on the map below and, we hope, on the streets, where we're sure you'll discover wonders few of us might notice as we motor by from home to work and back again. (Note: Google Chrome is the best platform for viewing the storymap.)

This storymap is produced as part of the Finding God in Googleville project of the Living Religion Collaborative at Santa Clara University, Elizabeth Drescher, PhD and Jaime D. Wright, PhD, Co-Principle Investigators. Some sites shown on the map may have been altered or destroyed since they were photographed. Other sites may be added as we continue our research and the narrative will be adapted as we learn more about the murals we are attempting to document. This storymap is, thus, is a work-in-process that tracks our exploration of public art and the religious landscape of Silicon Valley. If you have additional information about any of the sites on the map, or would like to suggest a site for us to visit and document, please email us at edrescher@scu.edu.

Our work has been supported by the  Bannan Institute at the Santa Clara University Ignatian Center  and the  Louisville Institute . For more information, visit the  Living Religion Collaborative website.