We took a bus to the Latino area of San Francisco, the Mission District, for one of the highlights of our visit to San Francisco, the Precita Eyes murals tour. Precita Eyes is a community based mural arts organisation which was founded in 1977. Its aim is “to enrich and transform urban environments and educate communities locally and internationally about the process and the history of public community mural art”. It offers low cost art classes for children, young people and adults, mural education workshops and seasonal community painting workshops. It also offers mural tours.
The tour we went on was led by the lovely Carmela Gaspar who was really interesting and very informative. Most of the tour took place in nearby Balmy Alley, which runs between 24th and 25th Street. Balmy Alley is a privately owned road in which all the walls and garage doors are covered in amazing murals, some painted in the 1970’s and some as recently as this year. Many of them have a political theme such as human rights, political corruption, gentrification and government injustice, and the titles are often in Spanish (click on the images to enlarge)
In addition to those in Balmy Alley there are more than sixty other murals in the Mission District. Precita Eyes have produced a map showing where they are, their titles and the names of the muralists who created them.
After feasting our eyes on these colourful, vibrant and very powerful murals we wandered through Mission, sampling some Mexican food on the way of course. We came to a bookshop called Medicina para Pesadillas – Medicine for Nightmares and saw a woman standing in the shop window holding a microphone, and a crowd standing outside. As we drew nearer, we realised that she was reading out her poems and they were being broadcast in the street! Later we also came upon various bands playing music in the street. It was a great atmosphere.
We ended the day walking to 18th Street to take a look at the amazing mural on the outside of the Women’s Building and then people watching in Dolores Park as we admired the great views over the city.
