In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Misstencil at a new school half a world away from her home in China.

Her time in Switzerland started off in business school, a topic that she admits she’s not the best at today. Aside from school, she visited other parts of Europe. She got a job in Switzerland, but called her family back home as much as she could afford to. One call she had with them around the new year one year had her feeling like family members were passing the phone and no one wanted to talk with her. She then learned that her grandfather, the one who had raised her, had passed away days before this call. The family had kept the news of his illness from Misstencil, ostensibly to protect her.

Her grandfather’s death took her about a decade to get over. She was left with a sense of aimlessness and lack of purpose. Going back home felt out of the question, and she liked Switzerland. But her school there had a joint program with a school in the US, and so she applied for a visa. That school was in South Carolina.

When her time in South Carolina came to an end, she had a choice—New York or San Francisco. She (correctly) chose The City.

Misstencil had friends in SF already, and they let her stay with her. Those friends told her about a website, then only in the Bay Area, that she could use to find her own place. That site was Craigslist, and they were right. She soon found a place of her own. The year was 2000, and little did she know that she was beginning what would be a decades-long stay here.

Her first job in The City was for a big company, one that had a dress code that put her in high heels. Looking back, Misstencil is so far removed from that corporate world that she cannot imagine wearing those shoes, or painting her nails, or other things that go along with corporate culture. But we’ll get to that.

She found herself meeting and befriending older hippies who encouraged her to pursue her art. She was broke, and they put her up. They helped her get art supplies. She had previously set aside any artistic ambitions while going to school and beginning what she thought would be a career. But summoning inspiration from the art her dad used to do and accepting the help of her friends in her new city, she decided to go for it.

Misstencil (not known by that name just yet) began to show her art. She recounts the first time she sold a piece, and how that felt. She walked by the gallery and saw that red dot and knew she had to tell everybody about it. She says that art and San Francisco and those early friends she made here saved her.

Looking back on her life and the emotional struggles she had endured, Misstencil came to realize that, as an adult and survivor of depression, she wanted to help kids going through that. She lived with roommates in a rent-controlled spot, thus allowing her to do side work of that nature.

The person who today is Misstencil of course wasn’t always known by that name. That started in 2022. She shares the origin story of her pseudonym.

It all began with her simply wanting to beautify parts of The City that had lost their luster, so to speak—boarded-up storefronts and the like. She found herself all over town, talking to people, hearing their stories, hearing how much neighborhoods meant to people. This led Misstencil to conceive of her “San Francisco Lonely Hearts” project, which is how my life intersected with hers. It’s a way for her to show her deep love for and appreciation of San Francisco.

She shares how she settled on stencil art for her method lately. She never had any formal training or went to art school. She says that because she didn’t have a very happy childhood, she wanted her art to help her feel like a kid again.

Misstencil goes on a side story about the time she connected with SF icon Frank Chu and invited him to do Bay to Breakers with her. We also talk about the day we met, when she showed her SF Lonely Hearts work-in-progress canvas outside of Vesuvio. In addition to the 2D art that day in Jack Kerouac Alley, she had Frank Chu on a Roomba holding his infamous “12 Galaxies” sign, and a Golden Gate Bridge bench placed in front of the canvas.

Before we wrap, I ask Misstencil about upcoming shows she has, and she humors me by plugging our “Keep It Local” show, which she’s in.

We end the episode with Misstencil’s thoughts about our theme this season and the theme of the show this week: Keep it local.

Photography by Nate Oliveira

Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1. Fredo and Laine had worked for the same company for a minute, but both left eventually. That social group they’d formed with a few other artists they worked with kept in touch. Some years went by.

Fredo attended a workshop for artists at Hunt and Gather in the Sunset, and let Laine know about it. She says that he asked her to be his “accountability buddy.” He says it wasn’t a question, but more a half-joking demand.

Fredo shares what an “accountability buddy” is, in this sense. At the workshop, each attendee set up goals for the next year. Your accountability buddy helps you stay on-target for achieving those goals. For Fredo and his buddy (Laine), part of that meant meeting almost once a week to go over what Fredo had been able to cross off his list and what was ahead. One vital area he felt he needed her help with was networking.

With Laine holding him to task, Fredo knocked out most of his 20 goals for 2023 by August of that year. But, because his networking goal didn’t have a metric, per se, it proved trickier.

And so they got together for coffee and sat in the parklet outside of Gus’s on Haight. Fredo brought a newspaper with him that day. He’d noticed that he kept hearing about art shows after the fact. Because he wasn’t really part of a larger scene (yet), he wondered how people found out about these events. His idea was to create a publication to do just that, and more. And then a funny thing happened. Laine had had the idea to make an art magazine that very same week. Kismet!

They took that as an obvious sign that this was something they had to do. And so they started hanging out even more, talking and talking and talking about what they wanted their publication to be. What kind of paper? What would it look like? How do we make it free for artists to be featured? Do we want advertising?

They answered those questions with several notebooks and a lot of caffeine. The first issue of 415 Zine took them seven months to make. Over that time, Laine came up with the idea of tying the title back to the structure of the publication—it could be four of something, one of something, and five of something. They did their due diligence when it came to researching the media landscape, especially when it came to art journalism. They settled on having their boundary be a geographic one, rather than having an artistic-genre focus.

The “4” would be short features on artists—two pages of full-color examples of their work accompanied by brief write-ups about them. The “1” would be an in-depth interview with a single artist, with several samples of their art to go with the interview. And the “5” would be spots around San Francisco for folks to go experience art. Places like Madrone Art Bar, where we recorded this episode.

I ask Laine and Fredo to talk about those seven months, from conception to the first publication, and the ups and downs they experienced in that time. Laine says she was in “no looking back” mode, and Fredo concurs. The only questions that popped up were around content. They were in it, and nothing would stop them.

Though that first issue took them a little more than half a year, they quickly decided that 415 Zine would be quarterly. Most of the heavy lifting of creating something from scratch had been done. And though putting together a publication like this is no small feat, they felt they had it down.

As we recorded that day in April 2025, Fredo and Laine were about to celebrate the first birthday of their creation. That party fell before this podcast was ready to go out, but I asked them to talk about the anniversary and what it means to have a full year and now five issues behind them.

We end the episode with Fredo and Laine’s thoughts about our theme this season—Keep it local.

Photography by Mason J.