Mujeres Muralistas
Las Mujeres Muralistas were an all-female Latina artist collective based in the Mission District in San Francisco in the 1970s. They created a number of public murals throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, and are said to have sparked the beginning of the female muralist movement in the US and Mexico. Their murals were colorful and large scale and often focused on themes such as womanhood, culture, beauty, and socio-political change. Patricia Rodriguez, Graciela Carrillo, Consuelo Mendez, and Irene Perez are recognized as the founders and most prominent members of the collective, but other female Chicana artists assisted along the way and even joined later on, such as Susan Cervantes, Ester Hernandez, and Miriam Olivo among others.
Las Mujeres Muralistas was one of the first mural art groups in the Mission District in San Francisco, reacting against the contemporary Chicano Art Movement which had been a male dominated movement. Las Mujeres Muralistas established their unique style in 1973. At this time women artists were at work painting murals but not as a collective. Chicano art was, from its very beginning, an art of protest, connected to social politics and the labor movement and concerned with creating distinctive work that reflected the Mexican experience in the United States. Member, Ester Hernández, went on to be credited with creating one of the first images to link the plight of farmworkers to the effects on consumers and the environment with her screenprint, Sun Mad, 1981. Groups of women artists of color, like Las Mujeres Muralistas, protested marginalization on the basis of gender, race and ethnicity. A few other Chicano Muralist groups in Northern California during the 1970's were Galeria de la Raza, Royal Chicano Air Force, and .
History
The Mujeres Muralistas got their start in the early 1970s. Patricia Rodriguez and Graciela Carrillo were college students studying at the San Francisco Art Institute. In an interview, Rodriguez recalled being unsatisfied with the education she was receiving at the Institute as it primarily revolved around the minimalist movement. She was a fan of using more color. Eventually she teamed up with Carrillo, and later Mendez and Perez, to form their all female artist group.At this time, the Mission District was predominantly Latino and the Muralistas were hugely inspired by the Chicano Movement and the cultures of their community. There were other muralists working in the Mission District at the time, but they were the first females to step onto the scene. The male artists, drawing from the imagery of Los Tres Grandes, often painted murals about violence, war, and revolutionary figures, but the Muralistas were not interested in such aggressively political paintings. They focused on portraying their culture, the beauty of Chicana/Latina-American womanhood, and the diverse range of Latinidad in the community.
Murals
''Latinoamerica'' (1974)
Their first publicly commissioned mural was called "Latinoamerica", located on Mission Street and 25th Street, and painted for the Mission Model Cities organization. They were tasked with creating a mural that would represent the Latino culture of the area. To accomplish this, they used a lot of symbolism that was relevant to Latinos in their mural, such as a pyramid of cornstalks illustrating the significant role that corn played in the lives of indigenous American peoples.The mural Latinoamérica helps to connect Latinos to their culture and teach future generations more about their cultural roots. Some culturally significant symbols found in the mural include an Aztec eagle and ancestors; this homage to Latin American mythology bridged a connection between the Latino community and their "indigenous past as a form of cultural empowerment." San Francisco's Mission District was home to a large and diverse group of Latinos, whom the Mujeres Muralistas acknowledged in their mural. Alongside Latinos native to the United States, Latinoamérica extended its representation to Latinos from nations such as Bolivia, Venezuela, and Peru. The mural recognized and honored Latinos from both North America and South America in efforts to foster a "pan-Latino identity." Much like the Mission District, the Murjeres Muralistas had a diverse group of Latinas, their unique cultural and national identities influencing their stylistic contributions to Latinoamérica. According to Latinas in the United States, set: A Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol, common themes underlying the work of many Latina artists were those of "human welfare and social justice." Artwork, for example, would depict people performing daily jobs and tasks, often focusing on the working class. In fact, Latinoamérica " inspiration from the role that Latinas in the labor force." In particular, the portrayal of women and children in Latinoamérica was the Mujeres Muralistas' way of redefining Latino murals, celebrating the Latino community with vibrant images instead of recreating the dark "'blood and guts' aesthetic" painted by their male counterparts.