Soccer team collab boosts profile of artist Kapitulnik

For its second year of releasing a special line of Pride merchandise, the professional women’s soccer team Bay FC didn’t want to do it in-house, as it had in 2024. It wanted to instead partner with a local artist in the Bay Area.

As it happened, artist Orlie Kapitulnik was not only a fan of the team but also a season ticketholder. She also had reached out to the team’s art director, Serena Marini, in the fall to express her interest in working with it in some capacity.

“It was sort of fate,” recalled Marini. “I had just created a list of artists I wanted Bay FC to look into working with.”

On it was Kapitulnik, as Marini acknowledged to the Bay Area Reporter that they were already a “fanboy” of hers.

“Once she reached out, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, we are going to definitely make something happen.’ When we started looking into making the Pride collection this year, her name was top of mind,” said Marini, who is queer and nonbinary. “Since then, we met a couple times at the matches and worked on the design.”

Kapitulnik, 37, who identifies as both queer and lesbian, drew inspiration from the sports merchandise she grew up with in the 1990s and loved. That era was known for “super graphic work,” she noted during an interview with the B.A.R.

“My sort of thought on it was we all celebrate Pride differently. We all wear our Pride differently,” said Kapitulnik, whose fiancée, Dominique Oneil, is director of programming at the Jewish Film Institute. “This line sort of is a homage to the gay rainbow while still keeping a cool, limited color palette.”

For it, Kapitulnik chose more muted orange and yellow hues and a dark green. Her design features seagulls, the Bay Bridge, a rainbow over a soccer ball and a portion of a person’s leg adorned in an athletic sock and soccer cleat.

“I chose to focus on the rainbow graphic and de-emphasize traditional colors because we all wear our Pride differently, and this merch should be a reminder that no matter how we celebrate, we must continue to raise our voices to fight for equality, the right to live authentically and love freely, and for the protection of our trans friends, family, and athletes,” she explained in a June 6 Instagram post with a photo of people wearing the merch at a soccer game.

While more subtle in nature, it nonetheless still reads as a Pride-inspired design, said Marini.

“We are used to seeing the standard rainbow with all the colors in it and that is a beautiful thing. Orlie did something we had talked about, using as inspiration nineties sports graphics that share a limited color palette but are just as playful and poppy in design,” said Marini, 32, who grew up in Menlo Park and now lives in San Francisco.

Marini, who has worked for Bay FC since the summer of 2023 and also does photography for it, told the B.A.R. that they give artists a wide berth when it comes to their collaborations. They have to follow a few rules when using the team’s official logo, otherwise they are largely free to design whatever they want, noted Marini.

“It’s just important to make sure that the merch we are producing and the art we are producing is something that comes from the community and comes from someone that identifies with that group and creates art that can express how they feel about their experiences and their relationship with Pride,” explained Marini.

Murals adorn new SF oceanside park
The commission from Bay FC is the second one this year helping to boost Kapitulnik’s public profile. She also was asked to create two murals at San Francisco’s new public park fronting Ocean Beach called Sunset Dunes.

She painted a sea-themed mural on the backside of a bathroom building located at the Taraval Street entrance into the park. Nearby on the former roadway she painted another mural featuring various marine creatures.

“For my mural work, I am always sort of inspired by the environment around us, the animals, and how the buildings and the natural environment intersect. But in, like, a charming, sweet way,” said Kapitulnik. “I think whimsy is definitely ingrained in how I go about creating my images.”

Her aquatic-inspired murals are among a number of art installations visitors to the park will find. Sunset Dunes officially opened to the public in April following voters’ approval last November of Proposition K, the ballot measure that closed the Great Highway that spans Ocean Beach and turned its traffic lanes into a recreational promenade.

Its passage was controversial, with an overwhelming majority of nearby residents voting against Prop K. It also spawned the recall effort against gay District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio, with Sunset District voters set to decide his political fate on September 16.

The animosity churned up by the closure of the roadway, for decades a convenient route for commuters in the city’s westernmost neighborhoods, has manifested into vandalism of several of the art installations at the park. One tagged with graffiti in the spring was a mural created by artist Emily Fromm just as they were close to finishing it.

As the B.A.R. noted in a profile of Fromm, who is nonbinary, in its June 26 Pride issue, a call for public help to repair it resulted in more than 100 people showing up over three days to assist them in completing the work on time. Although Kapitulnik didn’t have to deal with her murals being destroyed, someone did leave “very aggressive tire tread and skid marks” on the one painted on the roadway, which she had to clean up.

She was subjected to the same verbal harassment from passersby upset at the street closure as Fromm experienced. One woman told her she was creating “visual pollution” that “nobody asked for,” and told her to “go back where you came from.” Kapitulnik grew up in Palo Alto and now lives in San Francisco’s NOPA neighborhood north of Golden Gate Park’s Panhandle section.

“The murals Emily and I did, unfortunately, we got lumped into a neighborhood war with the local rep there,” said Kapitulnik, who works part time at Case for Making, a water color and art shop in the Outer Sunset. “Literally after the highway got closed and the vandalism happened, and it became clear to people in the neighborhood there was so much animosity being projected onto the artists making this work, I got nothing but positive interactions afterward.”

Soccer merch still for sale
As of July 2, unisex hoodies ($80) and tees ($40) featuring Kapitulnik’s design were available via the Bay FC’s online store . So were long sleeve shirts and tank tops ($40).

According to the team, it would donate 10% of the net profits from those purchased during Pride Month in June to the San Francisco Spikes soccer team. The LGBTQ recreational team had thanked Bay FC in a comment posted to its Instagram account last month.

“It means the world to see a pro club uplifting queer artists, supporting LGBTQ+ athletes, and showing love to inclusive soccer communities like ours,” stated the team.

Marini told the B.A.R. the 2025 Pride collection items should also be available at the stadium store during the team’s home games this month. Reaction from fans has been great, they said, noting they ran into people wearing the merch over Pride weekend in San Francisco.

“That made me really happy,” they said. “It seems fans resonate with it and are celebrating their pride through Bay FC and Orlie’s art.”

At the end of the day, noted Marini, “Queer people belong in sports. Trans people belong in sports. We will continue to show up loudly and proudly for ourselves and our community. I am really proud to do that with this club and proud to do that with Orlie this year.”

To see more of Kapitulnik’s art, visit her website. For more information about the Bay FC team, visit its website .