Inner Mission District between 24th Street and Garfield Square. Since 1973, most buildings on the street have been decorated with a mural
.
History
The earliest murals in the alley date to 1972, painted by Mia Galivez and children in a local child care center.[1] Artists Patricia Rodriquez and Graciela Carillo had rented an apartment on Balmy Alley and painted their first mural in the Alley, a jungle-underwater scene, in 1973.[1] Their two-woman team soon expanded and became known as Las Mujeres Muralistas.[1] Fellow member Irene Perez painted her own mural on the alley in 1973, depicting two back-to-back figures painting flutes.[2]
In 1984, in a second significant wave of murals in the alley, Ray Patlan spearheaded the PLACA project to install murals throughout the alley featuring the common theme of a celebration of indigenous Central American cultures and a protest of US intervention in Central America. Topics of the murals included the Nicaraguan revolution, Óscar Romero, and the Guatemalan civil war.[3] This culminated in the addition of twenty-seven murals during the summer of 1985, funded in part by a grant of $2,500 from the Zellerbach Foundation. This art project proved influential, inspiring the La Lucha Continua Art Park/La Lucha Mural Park in New York City the following year.[4]
Painting continues regularly in the alley, including new murals about gentrification and police harassment in 2012[5] and a restoration of one of the PLACA murals in 2014.[6]
Balmy Alley looking south from 24th Street towards Bernal Heights.
The Balmy Alley murals have been described, along with San Diego's Chicano Park and Los Angeles' Estrada Courts, as a leading example of mural environments that reclaim spaces for Chicanos and give expression to a history of Chicano displacement and marginalization.[9]
The mural grouping in the alley is internationally recognized, both as an exemplar of activist art[10] and as a tourist destination.[11]
Context
The Mission District has San Francisco's densest concentration of murals, often along political themes, sometimes described jointly as the "Mission School" of muralism.[12] Balmy Alley is often cited as the leading concentration within the Mission.[13]
Nearby Clarion Alley, another mural grouping by local artists, was inspired by Balmy Alley.[11][14]
See also
Precita Eyes, a mural arts education group, located near Balmy Alley
