SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Director of Cultural Affairs for the San Francisco Arts Commission Luis R. Cancel announced the 2011 Art on Market Street Poster Series featuring new work by local artists Elisheva Biernoff and Ian Huebert. Biernoff will launch the series with Once Upon a Time, six original posters that present defining moments that shaped San Francisco history, from the city's beginnings as the home of the Ohlone to the political activism of the 1970s. The posters will be displayed in the bus shelters on Market Street between 8th Street and the Embarcadero from Wednesday, May 4 through Friday, July 29, 2011.

"Elisheva Biernoff has distilled San Francisco's rich and complex history into six beautifully illustrated posters that offer Market Street pedestrians a look back in time at the people and events that formed this city into the incredible and beloved city it is today," said Mr. Cancel.

Hand-drawn and colored using Adobe Illustrator, Once Upon a Time focuses on San Francisco's landscape and how it has changed over time. Biernoff is particularly interested in how people today experience physical features that have vanished or that have been obscured by new development. Each poster includes a map centered around Market Street that identifies the sites of lost landmarks from a particular era. By marking the locations of the lakes, ships, gardens and theaters that once defined the character of the city, the series highlights the way the city has changed physically and visually. It also brings the past into the present by showing historical sites that city dwellers and visitors frequently pass through and over.

According to Biernoff, "The posters are not meant to offer a comprehensive look at San Francisco history, but are rather suggestive of the various eras and phases the city has gone through. Most significantly, it's about the people who have defined the city, and the risk-taking, intrepidity and activism characteristic of San Franciscans."

Elisheva Biernoff was born in Albuquerque, NM in 1980. She received her B.A. in Art from Yale University in 2002 and her M.F.A. from California College of the Arts in 2009. She lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

Her work searches out individual and cultural histories that are unfamiliar, overlooked, or forgotten. She mines old postcards and photographs for the stories they tell, and by meticulously re-inventing these seemingly generic objects, she pays tribute to the small things that sustain memory and provoke the imagination.

A recipient of the Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship and the Kala Art Institute Fellowship, Biernoff has shown locally at Triple Base Gallery, 2nd Floor Projects, the Headlands Center for the Arts, The Lab, SFAC Gallery, Blankspace and ProArts, and nationally at Federal Art Project (Los Angeles), the Philadelphia Art Alliance and the Coney Island Museum (New York).

Ian Huebert's poster series will be on view starting in August 2011.