Artist claims S.F. food hall copied his curvy work
“It’s not OK for this sort of thing to happen.” San Francisco artist Tim Lahan
Tim Lahan was eating dinner on Thursday night when a friend sent him a link to a San Francisco Chronicle article about a buzzy new food hall in downtown San Francisco. The friend had noticed that images throughout the IKEA-adjacent Saluhall on Market Street looked eerily similar to Lahan’s artwork.
Lahan was “shocked” when he saw Saluhall’s main branding image, published on its website, the walls of the food hall and on social media: a curved mouth, ear, eye and nose that appears to be a slightly rearranged version of his work, which has been published in the New Yorker and produced for other clients including Nike. Dozens of messages poured in, asking him if he had collaborated with Saluhall, and consternation started to spread on social media. He watched videos of Mayor London Breed on opening day at Saluhall walking past imagery that he felt had been “blatantly copied.”
“I just think it’s important that intellectual property rights are paid attention to,” he told the Chronicle. “That’s clearly not being respected.”
A Saluhall spokesperson said Friday that “this matter was just brought to our attention, and we are looking into it,” but did not answer specific questions for this article. Ingka Centres, IKEA’s real estate sister company, operates the 23,000-square-foot, twostory food hall, the anchor of a mixed-use development that also includes an IKEA store and a co-working space.
Lahan, a well-known San Francisco artist, said he started creating this body of work more than a decade ago. An illustration dated 2012 shows the same rounded eye, nose, ear and mouth perched atop a banana. In 2014, the nose was featured on the cover of Lahan’s first illustrated children’s book, titled “The Nosyhood.” He produced a series of similar illustrations published in the New Yorker in 2018 as well as for New Yorker T-shirts. The images helped build his reputation, he said, as he became known for this artistic style.
At Saluhall, similar illustrations decorated one main wall inside, customers’ food trays, the exterior of a photo booth and the building’s front doors and windows in advance of Thursday’s grand opening. People lined up in front of neon signs of comparable, rounded images decorating Saluhall’s in-house vendors, including a soft serve stand and cocktail bar. Social media videos showed employees wearing black aprons stamped with the yellow mouth, eye, ear and nose.
Lahan said he hasn’t formally registered copyrights to protect this work. But he said publishing giant Conde Nast, which owns the New Yorker, has “some legal right” to the images. He’s talking to lawyers and plans to pursue legal action.
Andy Jacobson of Bay Oak Law, an Oakland copyright attorney who has represented artists, said under a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Lahan needs an official registration with the U.S. Copyright Office in order to file an infringement lawsuit. But it’s simple to apply for one, and even without the registration, Lahan has options to protect his work, Jacobson said. While the Saluhall images are not an exact copy of his art, he could argue it qualifies as “derivative work, the rights of which belong to the artist,” Jacobson said.
“If he has five or eight or 15 of these similar things, then he would have a really good argument that they infringed upon his derivative work,” Jacobson said.
There’s also a possible argument for trademark infringement and, potentially, damages, Jacobson said.
“Companies can be stopped from using marks or advertising that falsely suggests some association,” he said. “If the artist has enough of a reputation, they can say, ‘Hey, people might think that I’m endorsing you and I’m not. You’ve gotta stop this now.’ ”
This isn’t the first time this has happened to Lahan. He said people often send him social media posts or other work with images that aren’t properly attributed to him. But the involvement of a massive development affiliated with an international company is a scale he hasn’t experienced before.
“Something that was created by an artist is not something that should be up for grabs to use for large corporations,” he said. “It’s not OK for this sort of thing to happen.”