“The City Is My Sweetheart”: Remembering the Art of Peet Lum

As another big move comes to an end, it’s time to figure out where all the art goes. I’ve collected a lot of small paintings and sculptures over the years, so this process always fills me with nostalgia for the San Francisco artists I’ve met along the way. None hit me harder than these two paintings by Pete “Peet” Lum. I think this is the fifth home where I’ve hung these two paintings over the past twenty years. Every time I unpack them, I end up thinking about Peet and that era of San Francisco all over again. Peet was a fixture of the San Francisco art scene in the mid-2000s. He played drums with the Human Beans, painted graffiti as “Goonies”, and could regularly be found selling his paintings on sidewalks around the Mission District. His paintings often featured cassette tapes, clouds, telephone poles, and whimsical phrases like “The city is my sweetheart” or “We never sleep”. He frequently used found objects, like 2x4s and chunks of wood from construction sites, and kept his…