Chalk outline detailing position of head with knife in hand. LAPD/Fototeka, 1950 via Huffington Post
Growing up in San Francisco in the 1970s I went on many school field trips. One of them made quite an impression. While walking around the outside of the Academy of Sciences, a museum located in Golden Gate Park, we saw the white outline of a body on a tree-shrouded path. For some reason at the time I believed this was the outline of a jumper. Regardless, I never forgot it and, since the arrival of the internet, have periodically Googled it to see if I can find who had jumped off the roof of the museum.
Last week I remembered having seen the chalk outline and Google it once again. However this time I learned about artist Richard Hambleton's Image Mass Murder.
Postcard of Hambleton’s Image Mass Murder 1976-1979 via Gallery 98 // via Woodbury House Art
In 1976 Richard Hambleton moved to San Francisco to attend the SF Art Institute. He made Image Mass Murder soon thereafter. It was a series of site specific artworks, created from 1976 to 1979 under the pseudonym Mr Reee, in which he asked friends to lie down and he'd trace their outlines in chalk and splatter red paint on them to emulate homicide victims. Hambleton's series "resulted in 600 crime scenes on the streets of 15 major cities across the United States and Canada." 1
Outline on a Vancouver sidewalk by the street artist R. Dick Trace-it, 1977, via Woodbury House Art
"It was on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner in December, 1976, that Hambleton was called a “psychic terrorist” and a “sick jokester” for his fake murder scenes."2 The police did not know at the time they were dealing with an artist. Hambleton also used the pseudonym R. Dick Trace-It for the "detective" "solving" the crimes using "Wanted" posters for fake felons.
I ask myself, is it possible the outline I saw in Golden Gate Park that day was a Richard Hambleton artwork? I am reminded that while chalk outlines are no longer used by police today, but they were common in the past. But who would jump off of a two story museum? The mystery persists and my search continues for someone who may have documented the locations of Hambleton's Mr Ree works in San Francisco in the late '70s.
Weegee, Outline of a Murder Victim, 1942 via Met Museum
1. Spellman Gallery
2. Vancouver Sun Obituary 2017
