Aaron Noble

b. 1961 in Portland, Oregon; lives and works in Los Angeles, California

Aaron Noble is an artist who has always worked at the intersection of pulp genre, street culture, and fine art. He still has most of his childhood comic book collection: the lodestone of his compositional sensibility. In the late ‘70s he graduated from Santa Cruz High School and moved to San Francisco, where he became deeply involved in the punk rock scene and briefly attended the San Francisco Art Institute, where he studied with the conceptual artist Howard Fried and the experimental writer Kathy Acker. During the ‘80s he wrote, raised wine grapes, and did performance art work culminating in a tour of post-Soviet Berlin and Czechoslovakia in 1990. A year later, in 1991, with five other artist-activists, he co-founded the Clarion Alley Mural Project in San Francisco’s Mission District, and was for a time associated with the Mission School artists, even as his own work as a street painter was evolving away from their folky, handmade style. The superhero abstract painting style that he is known for, developed on the streets of San Francisco, received its first proper art world recognition with a project of five large murals in the lobby of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, shortly after Noble’s relocation to that city in 2000. Since then he has painted murals around the world, participated in numerous gallery exhibitions, married an actress, adopted kids and started a successful lingerie retail business.