Ongoing performances and outings in the Central Market area of San Francisco May 15 through September 15 of 2014!
Made possible by a grant from the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development, The Black Rock Arts Foundation is thrilled to collaborate with artist Mauro ffortissimo to bring his ongoing Sunset Piano project to San Francisco.
Upcoming events:
Check our events page for upcoming events.
More Sunset Piano events will be announced soon!
Sunset Piano, Central Market Microhood 5/15/14 from Dean Mermell on Vimeo.
About the Project
Sunset Piano Opus 3 is the third iteration of artist Mauro ffortissimo ongoing series of unconventional public music performances. This social experiment poses the question; how will music, played outdoors in an urban environment, affect how we interact with one another?
The project began in the summer of 2013 when ffortissimo placed a dozen pianos against the backdrop of the beautiful San Mateo Coastline. The project quickly drew attention from the arts community and the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development.
Read about the entire Sunset Piano project at www.sunsetpiano.com and about the documentary film by Dean Mermell on the project at www.twelvepianos.com.
Join a Facebook group and follow the entire project at www.facebook.com/
See a wonderful gallery of the previous projects at twelvepianos.com/gallery
The project begins slowly, with a furtive piano sighting here and there. Then, over the course of the summer of 2014, grand pianos will conspicuously begin to appear throughout the city without notice, pulled by ropes on wheeled platforms by specially trained “piano ninjas”. Professional musicians, singers, and poets will be scheduled to perform at free cultural events.
Pianos will be brought to neighborhoods where some people have no home, let alone access to music. In numerous, diverse neighborhoods, city dwellers and artists of all walks of life will gather at piano happenings in to share their experiences of our urban existence. Art, music, and culture belong to everyone!
About the Artist
Born in 1962, Mauro ffortissimo grew up in Argentina where his interest in art and music lead him to study classical piano and visual arts. He emigrated to California in 1981 to further his artistic explorations, taking classes in printmaking, sculpture and painting in numerous academies including San Mateo College, Art Institute, and Berkeley Extension. ffortissimo was a founding member of “849 Folsom Music” a 13 member music and spoken word performance troupe that brought vital energy to the San Francisco “South of Market” artist underground scene in the pre-dot com years of the late 1980’s.
Mauro ffortisimo playing a piano for his Sunset Piano project.
Also a founding member of the Enso Art Collective and the Miles Davis Memorial Hall, ffortissimo has been investigating sounds with the deconstruction of pianos, becoming more able to expand the 12-tone scale. He does not subscribe to the romantic notion of a solitary artist, a suffering individual, hidden in a state of despair, creating work that only few can appreciate, instead ffortissimo travels the world, looking to the mundane, the sacred and the original with the same eyes, and listening to the music of diverse cultures, bringing it all home to work with it’s particular way of assimilation making art and music available to the community. When not traveling, ffortissimo lives in Half Moon Bay, California, where with wife/artist Carrie Hollister and nine cats, runs the Enso Yoga Studio and Art Center.