2025 woodcut print corona heights san fran San Fransisco woodblock printmaking printmaker contemporary artist charles spitzack man hole cover cross walk building with sky above

A San Francisco street scene at Corona Heights, the composition assembling a manhole cover, a crosswalk, a building elevation, and a band of sky above. The inclusion of street-level fixtures — particularly the manhole cover, an uncommon subject in print — signals an interest in the overlooked infrastructure that gives a neighborhood its specificity, in preference to a postcard vantage. The composition stacks horizontal zones (pavement, built form, sky) in a layered structure suited to separate-block printing, with each plane carrying its own color registration through kentō. As a 2025 work, the print sits among Spitzack's contemporary urban subjects following his 2024 award at the International Mokuhanga Conference in Echizen. The image draws on the meisho-e tradition of named-place prints, applied here to an everyday San Francisco vantage rather than a historical landmark, extending the genre's logic into contemporary American urbanism.