Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, hand-lettering, pinstriping
Website: golden-rose-of-san-francisco.com
Rose D'Amato was born in 1991 in Whittier, California, and lives and works in San Francisco. She is a second-generation sign painter and pinstriper: her father was a sign maker, and she grew up immersed in the visual culture of lowriders, hand-lettered signs, and the decorated surfaces of Southern California Latinx communities. She received a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016, and afterwards apprenticed and worked at New Bohemia Signs in San Francisco. She has been an Adjunct Professor of Hand Lettering at California College of the Arts since 2019, and was the 2023–2024 Headlands Center for the Arts Tournesol Awardee. She is a 2024 SFMOMA SECA Award winner and a 2025 San Francisco Artadia Award recipient. She is represented by House of Seiko in San Francisco and Gallery 16 in San Francisco.
D'Amato works with airbrush, gold leaf, spray paint, and hand lettering on canvas to create abstract compositions rooted in the visual language of sign painting, pinstriping, and lowrider culture. Her practice makes little distinction between the studio and the garage — between fine art and the skilled manual labor of sign making — treating them as a continuous field of creative inquiry. She works as a personal archive of the hand-painted signs of San Francisco, memorializing and celebrating a visual culture under threat from technological displacement and gentrification. A central concern is the question of whose labor and whose knowledge get to count as art history, and her paintings insist that the ingenuity of Latinx and working-class communities belongs in that history. Her approach is influenced by Mission School artists including Margaret Kilgallen, with whom she shares a devotion to forms drawn from folk art, craft, and the handmade.
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