Contents

Summary

Proyecto Mission Murals examines the origins of the community mural movement in San Francisco’s Mission District over close to two decades, from 1972 to 1988. Created in collaboration with community partners, the project includes documentation of murals created in the Mission District between 1972 and 1988, accompanied by reference images. It also features materials generously provided by the muralists themselves, the Mission community members and organizations that have supported their work, and scholars and journalists who have chronicled their activity, including interviews, essays, a documentary film, an audio zine, primary sources, and new artist biographies.

The interdisciplinary nature of Proyecto Mission Murals reflects the complexities and richness of the community mural movement. Rather than a cohesive or seamless narrative, this project conveys its wide-ranging aesthetics, the diversity of its participants, its changing nature, and the perpetual challenges faced by its artists.

Introduction

By Cary Cordova

As an artform, murals have a long history, but their rapid and expansive placement outdoors in the 1970s and 1980s revolutionized the medium. Muralist Estria Miyashiro described a world before and after: “Anybody born after 1984 in a major city in the United States does not know what a city full of bare walls looks like, right? So, my generation is the last that remembers. I remember there was no such thing as murals, you know. There was just bare walls.”^[i] The power of murals to advocate for grassroots concerns heightened their relevance and spurred their popularity. Murals became a social movement, forever changing the appearance of cities and towns around the globe.

In the 1970s, San Francisco’s Mission District emerged as an epicenter of mural activity. Artists saw the possibilities of murals to beautify the predominantly Latino, economically disenfranchised barrio while also depicting calls for civil rights and social justice.^[ii] For Carlos Loarca, the Mission made sense as a place for artists and community organizers to gather “because we all spoke Spanish. We were all from Latin America.”^[iii] Indeed, the Mission experienced a profound demographic transformation in the 1960s. As many white middle-class residents left inner city neighborhoods for the suburbs, a phenomenon known as “white flight,” working-class migrants moved into the Mission for its cheap apartments and access to employment in nearby factories. Between 1960 and 1970, the Mission District’s Hispanic population jumped from less than ten percent to about half of the neighborhood’s population.^[iv] As residents built up more Spanish-language businesses and services, the Mission became known as the heart, or el corazón, of San Francisco’s Latino community.

Mission artists drew inspiration from local activism by the United Farm Workers, the Black Panther Party, and the Third World Liberation Front, as well as from transnational liberation struggles. The images varied in content and aesthetics, with some ardently anti-capitalist, anti-war, and critical of city corruption and policing, while others conveyed images of Latin American homelands, Indigenous mythologies, and heroic civil rights leaders. A variety of dynamic murals appeared on the walls of schools, community centers, apartment buildings, small businesses, nonprofits, and plyboard fences. Local organizations, including the Galería de la Raza, Neighborhood Arts Program, Precita Eyes Mural Arts, and a host of nonprofits, provided essential sponsorship, funding, training, and networks. Gradually, the Mission attracted widespread media attention and tourism for the density, artistry, and visual impact of its murals.

Above all, the community mural movement openly challenged who art was for, where it could exist, and who could be an artist. By placing art outside, muralists also subverted the exclusionary politics of art institutions. Many had firsthand experience with the elitism and racism of art schools, galleries, and museums. Circumventing barriers to entry, muralists reimagined the canvas and produced art more often in spite of the established art world than with its support.

While often disillusioned with arts institutions, many artists still appreciated the city’s abundance of historic murals, especially those created in the 1930s and 1940s with the aid of funds from the Works Progress Administration. The collection of murals at Coit Tower and in post offices, schools, and other official buildings provided a template for generations of muralists.

Strong local ties to the history of muralism in Mexico existed in the city, partly illustrated by the presence of two murals by Diego Rivera (The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, at the California School of Fine Arts [later the San Francisco Art Institute] in 1931 and Pan American Unity at the Golden Gate International Exposition at Treasure Island in 1940). Several San Francisco muralists trained in Mexico, or with Mexican muralists, or benefitted from expert muralists who made the Bay Area their home, including Emmy Lou Packard, Stephen Pope Dimitroff, and Lucienne Bloch.

While several artists paid homage to the radical politics of this earlier period, others preferred to source popular culture, comix,^[v] and everyday life in the Mission. Many artists produced dramatically different work from one mural project to the next, as was the case for Chuy Campusano, who started his mural career with Homage to Siqueiros (1974), an incendiary critique of capitalism pointed at his patron, the Bank of America, in the tradition of David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and Rivera, known as “Los Tres Grandes.” The stylistic differences between this first commission and his monumental abstract work, the Lilli Ann mural (1986), is illustrative of the ways each mural project provided artists an opportunity for experimentation and diverse aesthetics.

Artists transformed bare walls into colorful, imaginative spaces, often purposefully intending to create a more beautiful and safer neighborhood. In the early 1970s, Mia Galaviz de Gonzalez turned to making murals with children in Balmy Alley as a way to make it feel safer for those same children. She also shared her paint with fellow artists Graciela Carrillo and Patricia Rodriguez, who found another wall to paint slightly further down the block. Irene Peréz joined in painting the alley, too. All of this activity gradually turned Balmy Alley into a popular destination for murals. It also marked the emergence of Las Mujeres Muralistas, a collective of women muralists, including Carrillo, Rodriguez, Pérez, and Consuelo Méndez. Women muralists often struggled with the discriminatory practices of their male counterparts. However, their mutual turn to each other as Las Mujeres Muralistas ultimately created some of the most extraordinary murals in the neighborhood.

While the art of women and children sparked change in Balmy Alley, the one-block street underwent a radical metamorphosis in 1984 when muralist Ray Patlán led a group of thirty-six muralists to protest U.S. involvement in Central America. They adopted the name “PLACA,” partly inspired by the word’s usage among neighborhood gangs to symbolically mark space with graffiti. In a group statement, they defined PLACA as “to make a mark, to leave a sign, to speak out, to have image call for response.”^[vi] Their collaboration produced twenty-seven murals, turning Balmy Alley into a space replete with images protesting U.S. policies. Together, they intended to “demonstrate in visual/environmental terms, our solidarity, our respect for the people of Central America.”^[vii] The event iconized communal opposition to President Reagan’s policies and conveyed spirited hopes of preventing his 1984 reelection. This was not to be; the 1980s ended with little regime change between President Ronald Reagan and President George H. W. Bush. Artists and arts organizations struggled to survive in the 1980s, as these administrations more often defunded than supported the arts. Proyecto Mission Murals carries through the Reagan years to witness this struggle for funds and support, but also to observe the ways that artists in the neighborhood joined together in community organizing and transnational solidarity struggles.

By the 1990s, muralists ventured into increasingly challenging collaborations. Maestrapeace, painted in 1994 by a team of women artists (Juana Alicia, Miranda Bergman, Edythe Boone, Susan Kelk Cervantes, Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton, Irene Pérez), is one example of the monumental artistry and technical prowess that Bay Area women muralists perfected over many years of mural making. The artists covered two sides of the four-story Women’s Building with a brilliantly colored, intensely detailed iconographic history of women from around the globe. Maestrapeace points to the ways the community mural movement had evolved in scale and technique.

This era also saw the beginnings of the tech boom’s impact on the Mission. As tech workers migrated from Silicon Valley to San Francisco, the Mission emerged as a desirable destination. In the 1990s, the rapidness of gentrification challenged the capacity of artists and other low-income residents to stay in the Mission, which also dramatically reshaped the area’s cultural production. Many artists personally experienced this evolving economic destabilization in the form of rent increases and questionable real estate gambits, leading them to center displacement as a pivotal concern in the art.

While these stresses unfolded, a new generation of artists started to gain visibility for their contributions to the neighborhood’s mural movement. Inspired by Balmy Alley, this loose collective of artists gathered to paint Clarion Alley in 1992. This, however, gradually posed a complex art historical problem, as Clarion Alley captured the attention of arts institutions in a way that never shined on Balmy Alley, Maestrapeace, or the preceding decades of Mission muralism. Indeed, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and a variety of arts institutions heralded Clarion Alley and this new generation of artists as “The Mission School,” taking the moniker of the neighborhood while also excluding many years of artistic activity.

In some respects, Proyecto Mission Murals tackles this erasure by focusing on earlier years of cultural production, though this dividing line is ultimately quite porous. Many of the younger artists working in the Mission acknowledged and relied on the expertise of the long-standing arts community. Nonetheless, the institutional anointing of “The Mission School” underscores the complexities of documenting the origins of the community mural movement in San Francisco’s Mission District with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This digital humanities project represents a starting point for recognizing the tremendous artistic activity that has shaped the Mission District and contributed to the richness of the community mural movement around the globe.

Notes

1. Oral history interview with Estria Miyashiro conducted by Camilo Garzón on July 13, 2021, for Proyecto Mission Murals.
2. For more on the cultural and artistic transformation of the Mission, see Cary Cordova, The Heart of the Mission: Latino Art and Politics in San Francisco (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). The use of the term “Latino” is imperfect. As Eduardo Contreras writes, “Latinos is linguistically gendered and an imperfect way to classify a population composed of women, men, and individuals who may have identified otherwise.” Like Contreras, I use Latino in keeping with a twentieth-century focus, while also pointing to the importance of engaging with “gender inclusivity and fluidity.” See Contreras, Latinos and the Liberal City: Politics and Protest in San Francisco (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 14. This project uses Latino, Latina, Chicano, and Chicana as historical terms reflective of the period, while also applying Latinx and Chicanx as inclusive contemporary terms. Drawing on the writing of Richard T. Rodríguez, this project aspires “to champion the X as drawing attention to and not overshadowing nonbinary and gender neutral and nonconforming individuals.” See Rodríguez, “X marks the spot,” Cultural Dynamics 29, no. 3 (2017), 202–13.
3. Oral history interview with Carlos Loarca conducted by Cary Cordova in 2003 for The Heart of the Mission.
4. Cordova, Heart of the Mission, 67. As the census has a history of undercounting Latinos, concrete statistics are difficult to establish. See Julie Dowling, Mexican Americans and the Question of Race (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014).
5. Comix refers to a rebellious subculture of the comics industry that redefined the possibilities of the artform in the 1970s. See Patrick Rosenkranz, Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2008).
6. “Placa,” Community Murals Magazine, Fall 1984, 10.
7. Ibid.

Murals

Biographies

Documentary

Audio Zine

Essays

Contributors

Essays

Cary Cordova
Associate professor of American Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Ella Maria Diaz
Professor and chair, department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, San José State University

Terezita Romo
Art historian, curator, writer, and associate faculty and lecturer in Chicana/o Studies at University of California, Davis

Mauricio Ramírez
Artist, curator, and University of California President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Chicana/o Studies at University of California, Davis

Biographies

Kevin Cruz Amaya
PhD candidate in Chicano/o/x Studies and Central American Studies at University of California, Los Angeles

Camilo Garzón
Writer, editor, voice director, poet, interdisciplinary artist, oral historian, multimedia producer, journalist, and educator.

Gabriela Rodriguez-Gomez
PhD candidate in Chicano/o/x Studies and Central American Studies at University of California, Los Angeles

Community Advisory Committee

Juana Alicia
Muralist, printmaker, illustrator, and educator; founding director of the True Colors Mural Project

Susan Kelk Cervantes
Mural artist and founding director of Precita Eyes

Lydia Chavez
Founder and editor of Mission Local and former journalism professor at University of California Berkeley

Tim Drescher
Former co-editor of Community Murals magazine and author of San Francisco Bay Area Murals: Communities Create Their Muses, 1904–1997

John Jota Leaños
New media artist and assistant professor of social documentation at University of California Santa Cruz

Fátima Ramírez
Cultural arts curator and interim executive director of Acción Latina

Josué Rojas
Mural artist, educator, and former executive director of Acción Latina

Melissa San Miguel
Curator, arts educator, and MA/PhD student of art history and archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park

Project Team

Harmony Baker
Intern, Interpretive Media

Noah Biavaschi
Web Developer, SFMOMA

Javier Briones
Filmmaker, 32K Productions

Kevin Carr
Producer, Interpretive Media, SFMOMA

Sylvia Castillo
Website Product Manager, SFMOMA

Julie Charles
Deborah and Kenneth Novack Director of Education, SFMOMA

Chad Coerver
Former Leanne and George Roberts Chief Education and Community Engagement Officer, SFMOMA

Cary Cordova
Associate Professor of American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin

Kari Dahlgren
Director of Publications, SFMOMA

Natalia De La Rosa
Intern/Production Assistant, Interpretive Media, SFMOMA

Laila E. Dreidame
Former Associate Director, Foundation and Government Partnerships, SFMOMA

Claudia Escobar
Film editor

Erin Fleming
Former Content Producer, Interpretive Media, SFMOMA

Erica Gangsei
Director of Interpretive Media, SFMOMA

Stephanie Garcés
Former Education and Community Engagement Coordinator, SFMOMA

Camilo Garzón
Oral historian and audio zine director

Santino Gonzales
Associate Content Producer, Interpretive Media, SFMOMA

Tomoko Kanamitsu
Barbara and Stephan Vermut Director of Public Engagement, SFMOMA

Myisa Plancq-Graham
Content Producer, Interpretive Media, SFMOMA

Tamara Porras
Former Manager of Educator Engagement, SFMOMA

Jessica Ruiz DeCamp
Former Assistant Editor, Publications, SFMOMA

Melissa San Miguel
Project researcher

Fengxue Zhang
Interpretive Media Coordinator

Many current and former SFMOMA staff provided essential support for the project, including Paul Armstrong, Deane Brannen-Jurgenson, Maria Castro, Gillian Edevane, Ian Gill, Clara Hatcher Baruth, Rebecca Herman, Bosco Hérnandez, Megan Kiskaddon, Julie Lamb, Samantha Leo, Mei Li, Jenn Livermore, Stella Lochman, Marla Misunas, Lucy Medrich, Christo Oropeza, Cecilia Platz, Caroline Stevens, Anna Tang, Adine Varah, and Misty Youmans.

The project team extends additional thanks to the following: Josiah Luis Alderete and Olivia Peña, narrators of the audio zine; Victor Altamiro, Beth Chapple, Ida Galván, Lucy Laird, Inés Marcos, and Rachel Walther, who provided editorial support; Gina Broze, rights and image research coordinator; transcribers Celeste Lindahl and Mary Geitz; and translators Jane Brodie, Odette León, Mario Mireles, and Melisa Palferro. For their work on the documentary, we thank Chris Tipton-King, videographer, along with Venezuela crew members Edwin Corona Ramos, cinematography; 2nd camera, Stefania Chehade; and Gustavo Vera, sound recordist.