Aaron Moses Wade first began sharing large-scale street paintings in San Francisco, California and later in Los Angeles, New York and Salvador, Brazil. Intended as simple gifts to local communities, Wade offered his paintings as wood-mounted installations that could be “collected” by anyone motivated enough to take them. Ranging in length from 3 meters to 30 meters, some pieces would be taken within hours while others remained in place for years. Because his collectible street paintings were mostly anonymous, they would often take on a life of their own. Without knowing he was the artist, people often gave very personal accounts of their spontaneous interactions with his street work. For Wade, this became a very compelling part of his anonymous practice. In some cases he found his paintings changed hands multiple times. In rare cases, another artist claimed credit for his work. After years of changing hands, some pieces eventually found their way back to him with new stories and new meaning. Despite his attempted anonymity, Wade’s street installations have been featured in various publications like the Los Angeles Times, Juxtapose Magazine and The San Francisco Chronicle. Because of his unconventional approach to sharing art, SF Columnist Herb Caen described Wade as having to be “corralled” into an early gallery show.
After graduating from University of California at Berkeley, Aaron Wade financed his anonymous street paintings by working as a rigger, an electrician, a sign painter, a computer graphics rotoscope artist, a fashion photographer and eventually as a cinematographer. Finding cinematography to be a uniquely fruitful platform that fused his love of art and physics, Wade eventually pioneered the use of infra-red 35mm film in commercial cinematography and rose to work at the highest level of film production in nearly 40 different counties. His award-winning cinematography is part of the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Wade and his family are currently semi-nomadic. Wade now paints full-time with a studio practice in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Big Island of Hawaii and sometimes Berlin, Germany.
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