Miranda Bergman (born 1947) is a Jewish American muralist, interdisciplinary artist, essayist, and educator who has worked in the United States, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Palestine, among other places. She was born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission District. She has been affiliated with the Haight-Ashbury Muralists (a group that formed during protests against the Vietnam war) with Jane Norling and Peggy Tucker, and the Working Peoples’ Artists collective. She has also been associated with the PLACA collective, working on murals including Culture Contains the Seeds of Resistance Which Blossoms into the Flower of Liberation (1984), created with O’Brien Thiele, which is still extant in Balmy Alley. She created the Quetzal mural in the Mini Park in 1977. She also worked on the first mural on the San Francisco Women’s Building in 1982 with PLACA, a project she revisited in her mural making two decades later. In 1978, as a part of the Alvarado Art Project funded by the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) arts program, Bergman worked with young women in the city’s Juvenile Hall to paint murals on the insides of their cell doors and elsewhere. Most of Bergman’s work straddles artistry and social activism, often expressing and representing social struggles with solidarity and expressing cultural celebrations of those represented in her work. Other murals Bergman co-created in San Francisco include Rainbow People (1974), Our History Is No Mystery (1976), and Educate to Liberate (1988). In 1989 she collaborated with Susan Greene on the Break the Silence Mural Project. In 1994, she worked on her best known mural and collaboration, MaestraPeace, at the San Francisco Women’s Building. Bergman led the work in the company of six other artists and muralists: Meera Deesai, Ivonne Littleton, Susan Kelk Cervantes, Juana Alicia, Irene Peréz, and Edythe Boone.
Camilo Garzón
