“Spray Area”: The Evolution of Airbrushing in the Bay

Last year, my wife and I left our hometowns in the Bay Area to live in Mexico. As millennials born and raised in the Bay, we said goodbye to our beloved coast more than once: We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge together, kayaked the shores of Alameda, and dined at our favorite Thai, Ethiopian, and Peruvian restaurants (you don’t know how life-giving California’s culinary diversity is until you’ve left).

The most significant memory from that whirlwind month was visiting the San Jose Flea Market. There, we got our son an old school airbrushed t-shirt with his name artfully spritzed in elegant, sweeping letters across the toddler-sized chest fabric. The task took less than 20 minutes. But symbolically, it gave us hope that our son might one day remember the same version of the Bay Area that we do: one in which artists and working- and middle-class families could make a decent living.

It was a rite of passage to get him personalized airbrushed gear — a memento that harkens back to the Bay Area of the 90s and aughts, when my wife and I, Mexican Americans living in a pre-smart phone society, could get our sneakers, jeans, and shirts airbrushed at malls, county fairs, Great America, and of course, flea markets.

Much of the culture and community from that era has faded, or even completely vanished in today’s dysfunctional maelstrom of tech-fueled capitalism. When’s the last time you had your shirt airbrushed by hand at the Great Mall? And yet, if you know where to go, you can find remnants of our airbrushed past, replete with artists who have adapted and evolved in wildly fresh ways.