Mujeres Muralistas
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Las Mujeres Muralistas ("The Muralist Women") 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[by whom?] 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,[1] 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.[2] 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.[3] 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.[4] 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 Brocha de Valle.[5]
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.[6] 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 (around 45% of the neighborhood was Latino according to a 1970 census)[1] 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.[7]