By Zara Irshad, Staff writer March 24, 2025 - San Francisco Chronicle
Hundreds of watercolor paintings will replace advertising spaces in BART stations across the Bay Area, one of several ways that the transit organization is aiming to engage riders.
The original artworks were created by Oakland painter, poet and naturalist Obi Kaufmann in an effort to revive BART’s Poster Art Program, which launched in 2010 and has been on hiatus for the past eight years. Past iterations have featured original works from Miwako Nishizawa, Mónico Chávez, Josh Ellingson and Owen Smith.
“To be able to put the ecology of the Bay Area front and center in peoples’ minds and eyes and hearts, for so many thousands of people who take the train every day, is a big honor and privilege for me as an artist and poet,” Kaufmann told the Chronicle.
He created three different paintings for the project — “Big, Beautiful Birds of the Bay Area,” “Our Wildlife Neighbors of the Bay Area” and “Endangered Species of the Bay Area” — each of which depicts a different BART-accessible space and its wildlife. The paintings have been printed onto posters to distribute across the system starting March 24. They will soon be made available for purchase as prints and on T-shirts at Railgoods.com.
Watercolor posters are replacing advertisements in BART stations. Here’s why
Greg