Halfway down Balmy Alley, a mural by Hector Escarramán is disappearing from the weathered fence it was painted on. The 1995 piece titled “Icons of Mexican Art” features Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera among other legendary figures, but as the paint chips away and a vine spread across the top-right section, their faces are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish.
Yano Rivera, who calls himself the mural doctor, stopped in front of the piece while walking down the alley alongside fellow muralist Tirso Gonzalez. “This is way past where we want to be for restoration,” Rivera said.
Escarramán’s work is one of six that a group of Mission muralists has set out to restore with a $129,294 Community Challenge Grant from the city. Five of the works are in Balmy Alley, and one is in the mini-park at 24th and York. In September, the original artists will return to the alley to restore their own pieces.
“This is the first time we’ve come together to apply for grant money as a group,” Gonzalez said. Typically, artists self-fund their restorations or apply for grants individually.
About two years ago, Gonzalez and muralist Juana Alicia Araiza became concerned about the deterioration of the Balmy Alley murals and decided to take matters into their own hands.
“There’s no maintenance from the city,” Araiza said. “It all falls on artists.”
They brought in Rivera; Gonzalez’s daughter, Lucía González Ippolito, a muralist and activist who lives on Balmy Alley; and Brooke Oliver, a copyright attorney who also lives there. Last year, Ippolito encouraged the group to apply for the grant.
Robynn Takayama, who manages the Community Challenge Grants, said in a statement that the program was built for projects like this. “The Mission’s murals are more than beautiful works of art,” she said. “They tell the stories of the neighborhood and the people who have shaped it.”
For the Mission Mural Restoration Project, these six murals are just the first step. The collective plans to use the finished restorations as evidence that the city should pay to maintain public art in the same way it pays to create it: consistently.
“We see this as a beginning of a larger effort,” Gonzalez said.
Collective Memory
Beyond their beauty, the murals are cultural artifacts preserving the neighborhood’s shared history. Las Mujeres Muralistas, an all-female Latina artist collective, painted Balmy Alley’s earliest works in the 1970s. Over the decades since, artists covered the alley with images of the Nicaraguan revolution, the Guatemalan civil war and the assassination of Salvadoran archbishop Óscar Romero. Ippolito painted the neighborhood’s gentrification, titled “Mission Makeover,” alongside her father in 2012.
“We told our stories ourselves because no one else would tell them,” Araiza said. “Yes, it’s pretty, but there’s so much more to it.”
After 24th Street was designated the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District in 2014, Rivera conducted an informal survey of the neighborhood’s murals. He found a significant gap running from the 1970s through the 1990s, which he called “a loss of material culture.”
When Araiza’s 1983 mural “Las Lechugueras,” a work drawing from her years organizing with farmworkers, deteriorated beyond the point that she could restore it herself, she went to the city for money. They denied the request, telling her it would be easier to fund a new work than restore the old one. In 2004, she painted “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters” over the same wall on 24th Street and York.
“It’s one of the icons of the mission, but we lost ‘Las Lechugueras,’” Gonzalez said of the replacement. “Each mural we lose, we lose part of our historic memory because those murals reflect our participation in the city, politics, international politics.”
Irene Pérez co-founded Las Mujeres Muralistas and had tried for years to restore her own 1972 Balmy Alley piece without success. “She couldn’t get the money. She couldn’t get the people to help her,” Gonzalez said. With the grant, Pérez will consult on the restoration while muralist Flavia Elisa Mora holds the brush.
The murals also bring people to the neighborhood. Precita Eyes and other organizations run walking tours through the alley, and visitors come from across the country and overseas.
Gonzalez once asked a group of French tourists why they had chosen a one-block alley over Alcatraz or the Golden Gate Bridge.
They told him European magazines write about Balmy as an open-air museum, free to walk through and painted by the people who live there.
Door to Door
The collective can’t restore anything without the neighborhood’s permission. Owners and tenants must sign off before the grant money can be used on any wall, so the artists have spent a lot of time knocking on doors.
The collective originally proposed 10 murals for restoration and ended up with six. One fell through because restoration would have required replacing an entire garage door. Some building owners turned them down because they didn’t want the hassle.
Still, the residents have been largely supportive of the muralists’ efforts. Some neighbors have started clearing plants and trash away from the walls, and the collective has a form in the works for volunteers who want to help once painting begins.
“We cannot do this without the community,” Gonzalez said.
The designs for the Balmy Alley restorations are currently waiting on approval from the Arts Commission. Once confirmed, they expect to start work in September.
While they wait, Araiza has been at work on another wall entirely. A different grant came through, this time from Avenue Greenlight, to fund a partial restoration of “Maestrapeace.” The behemoth artwork covers most of the Women’s Building on 18th Street and was originally painted in 1994 by 7 artists along with 50 volunteers, all women.
The mural hasn’t been touched since 2012. “Really, it should be restored every five years,” said Meera Desai, who painted the original alongside Araiza.
The Bigger Picture
With hundreds of murals throughout the Mission and over 1000 across the city, conservation and restoration at scale may require more than one-time grants. “We cannot do it on our own,” Gonzalez said. “It would have to be intentional, like one part of the budget would go only to preserve the murals.”
“We are most qualified to paint,” Araiza said, “not necessarily to fund.” Gonzalez said he wants Balmy Alley designated as a public art space and landmark, and some of the individual murals declared historic, a status that would open a funding path when a mural is damaged.
“Once you restore them, they look new. It’s like when you paint your house,” he said. “We’re gonna have six new pieces there. People are just gonna be so blown away.”