In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with mural artist Juana Alicia...
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Today, Emily chats with mural artist Juana Alicia Araiza.
About Artist Juana Alicia:
Juana Alicia has been creating murals and working as a printmaker, sculptor, illustrator, and studio painter for over thirty years. Her style, akin to genres of contemporary Latin American literary movements, can be characterized as magical and social realism, and her work addresses issues of social justice, gender equality, environmental crisis and the power of resistance and revolution.
The artist has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Windcall Residency, Master Muralist Award (Precita Eyes), Woman of Fire Award, among other recognitions, and her sculptural and painted public commissions (individual and collaborative) can be seen in Nicaragua, Mexico, Pennsylvania and in many parts of California, most notably in San Francisco. They include SANARTE at U.C.S.F. Medical Center, SANTUARIO at the San Francisco International Airport, LA LLORONA'S SACRED WATERS at 24th and York Streets in the Mission of San Francisco, the MAESTRAPEACE mural of the San Francisco Women’s Building, and GEMELOS at the Metropolitan Technical University in Mérida, Mexico.
In 2019, Juana Alicia, in collaboration with her sister muralists, published MAESTRAPEACE: San Francisco’s Monumental Feminist Mural, through Heyday Books, and is now collaborating with Tirso G. Araiza on a graphic novel, La X’Taabay. She is currently the recipient of the Golden Capricorn Award from the San Francisco Arts Commission, which includes solo exhibition at the SFAC Main Gallery in summer of 2023. In 2021, she was awarded a Eureka Fellowship, and in 2022, a California Arts Council Legacy Award.
Visit Juana Alicia's Website: JuanaAlicia.com
Follow Juana Alicia on Social Media: @Juana_Alicia
Learn More About Juana Alicia's Exhibit - Me Llaman Calle: The Monumental Art of Juana Alicia
--
About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
--
CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
2023-09-12 - AIA - EP009 - Juana Alicia Araiza
Artist Juana Alicia: [00:00:00] I hadn't done my own personal public mural until I did Las Enriquedas at 24th and York Streets. And I rented a pressure washer and I water blasted the wall and I hired a scaffolding company and I just got up there and started making the path by walking it.
Host Emily Wilson: That's Juana Alicia on making her first San Francisco mural. Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm your host, Emily Wilson. As a writer in San Francisco covering the arts, I see so many hardworking artists doing interesting work here in the Bay Area and I wanted people to know about them. So I came up with Art is Awesome.
Since the 80s, Juana Elisa Arreza has been a leading figure in the California mural movement with work all around the Baåy Area, including at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and in San Francisco's Mission District, where Juana Alicia lived for years and did her first mural at 24th and York Streets.
Through September 23rd, there's a show at the San Francisco Arts Mission main gallery on Van Ness. Me Llaman Calle, the monumental art of Juana Elisa. The show has colorful sketches for her murals as well as recent black and white illustrations for a book telling the story of a Yucatan Mayan myth. [00:02:00] Juana Alicia was born in Newark and grew up in Detroit, often visiting Diego Rivera's Detroit industry murals.
When she was 19 years old, she moved out to Salinas after labor leader Cesar Chavez offered her a job. While people in the galleries looked at her sketches for her murals of a yellow merry go round, cactuses, and her most famous for the women's building, Juana Alicia talked about moving to California, getting a degree in bilingual education and painting murals.
Artist Juana Alicia: I think it's Wynton Marcellus that says there's two alarm clocks that go off in your life. The one that wakes you up in the morning and the one that sounds within your soul, you know, when you realize what you're supposed to do, uh, on the planet. And definitely walking into the patio, grand patio in the middle of the art institute where, you [00:03:00] know, four massive walls are full of Rivera's murals. It was an aha moment for me. It was my second alarm clock and I just knew it was riveting. I knew that this was something I wanted to do.
Host Emily Wilson: Juana Alicia loved to draw. Her parents were involved in labor issues and she made posters for the United Farm Workers Union.
Artist Juana Alicia: On one of Cesar Chavez's national tours. I met him and I gave him one of the posters that I made for the Boycott of Gallo Wines and A& P Markets. And he recruited me on the spot to come to Salinas and work with the UFW as an organizer. Or work in the arts. He actually recruited me to do drawings for El Malcriado newspaper.
Host Emily Wilson: She didn't want to stay in the office.
Artist Juana Alicia: I lived in a house of similar workers for room and board and 5 a week. Cause that's what you got with the union. And then I worked at [00:04:00] regular jobs in the fields. Picking lettuce, celery, thinning and hoeing, working in the apples and garlic and all kinds of things on the lettuce machines and this was a very important and formative part of my education with working class intellectuals who were part of an important labor movement in the United States, organizing farm workers.
Host Emily Wilson: After a few years, Juana Alicia stopped organizing with the farm workers.
Artist Juana Alicia: When I was 23 and I was 7 months pregnant, I had to stop working in the fields. I had pesticide poisoning, you know, and I needed, I needed to stop working. And I got a job at a bilingual school in Salinas as a classroom assistant.
Host Emily Wilson: She transferred to UC Santa Cruz and got a degree in bilingual education. [00:05:00] In 1983, she moved to San Francisco and did a mural of lettuce pickers. That's the first design you see when you go into the exhibit.
Artist Juana Alicia: But I hadn't done my own, like, personal public mural until I did Las Vegas at 24th and York Streets. And, um, you know, I rented a pressure washer and I water blasted the wall and I... I hired a scaffolding company and I just got up there and started, you know, making the path by walking it.
Host Emily Wilson: That mural is gone, destroyed by water damage.
Designs for the blue and red, Las Lloronas Sacred Waters, which replaced it, hang in the show.
Artist Juana Alicia: We didn't know at that time that, you know, you need to etch the wall with, uh, You need to, you know, prepare the wall in certain ways so that the painting won't deteriorate. And after many years, that painting did bubble up and chip off [00:06:00] and mostly water damage and fade.
So now we have much improved technical approaches that can pretty much guarantee that the color will hold for a hundred years.
Host Emily Wilson: In 1990, Juana Alicia went to the San Francisco Art Institute. She didn't love it. She says she got attacked for doing narrative work with political content. But she remembers some instructors fondly, like the beloved Carlos Villa, who she calls an ally.
The show at the Arts Commission has several sketches of the designs for the Women's Building in the Mission, one of the largest and best known murals in San Francisco.
Artist Juana Alicia: Painting the Maestrapiece mural on the women's building was one of the most incredible, fulfilling experiences of my lifetime. Working with those six other sisters in paint, Miranda Bergman, Edith Boone, Mira Desai, Susan Cervantes, Yvonne Littleton, and we were like bonded [00:07:00] for life through that experience of basically 18 months of painting the mural, the first phase.And then we've had several other phases where we added the interior and the corner and restored it with a young generation of women artists.
Host Emily Wilson: The muralists were only given one set of walls on the facade of 18th street to paint. They wanted to go bigger.
Artist Juana Alicia: We decided that we would take on the whole building.
Without telling them that we would design the whole building and surprise them at the presentation, right? This is all in real life, presential, you know, it's not virtual. There was no internet happening for us or anything at that time and they called together a large, you know, group of women to look at this and we presented our drawings for the whole building and our fundraising The idea was to sell names on the wall because there's all these women's names on the wall and you could, you know, purchase a name, I think 25 or [00:08:00] 50 of your grandmother or your auntie or whoever you wanted.
And we each got seven names of our own to pick. We sold the names and that was a fundraising tool to be able to finance such a huge project. But I think we made about 5 an hour, if that. On that project, it was very underfunded, sort of iconic situation for women and women of color artists, but nevertheless, it was incredibly fulfilling to work with that group and to make the designs and to then work with a hundred women volunteers that assisted us on the project and to work with the women's building and their community.
Host Emily Wilson: Juana Alicia now lives much of the year in Mérida with her husband, artist Tirso González Arraiza. A forthcoming graphic novel they worked on together, a retelling of a Yucatan Mayan myth, is in the show.
Artist Juana Alicia: Tirso, my husband, had been telling me the story of [00:09:00] La X’tabay for a long time with his own embroideries to the story.
He's a great writer, not a published writer until now, but an amazing craftsman with words. And I said to him, you know, do me a favor brother and write that down. So he took a long hiatus in the dark woods of Sweden during winter and wrote the story. And when I read it, I'm like, Oh my God, I want to illustrate this.
And originally, we were going to both illustrate it. He's a tremendous graphic artist, master printmaker, illustrator, but I started getting busy with it and he said, Oh, go ahead, you just do it, because I really wanted to do it. So he was gracious enough to step aside and let me do all the illustrations.
Yeah, so, the story is not the traditional story. It takes off from where the traditional story begins. And it sort of, um, resuscitates La X’tabay as not the, um, malfeasant. [00:10:00] Character that she appears to be, you know, it's more of like a feminist, I say, eco feminist sort of retelling of the story.
Host Emily Wilson: This is the part of the show, Three Questions, where I ask the artists the same three questions to learn a little more about them. When did you know you were an artist? What is some work that made an impact on you? And what is the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area?
Artist Juana Alicia: When did I know I was an artist? I think when my mother had me and my sister working on the kitchen floor making giant paper dolls when we were respectively three and six years old. I knew I was an artist when I I stepped into Dr. Clete [00:11:00] Collins Taylor's art history classroom when I was a freshman or sophomore in high school.
And this woman, she taught illustration, fashion illustration, commercial and fine art. She taught art history. She was an artist. It is an amazing encyclopedia of knowledge about art, and I just knew, I, um, I just felt it. And when I went to the Art Institute to see the Rivera murals, it was really, um, Dr.Taylor who got me working in sketchbooks. And I started keeping sketchbooks when I was a teenager, and I just, I could draw. And I, and I loved drawing, so. There are several works of art that made a very big impact on me as a young person. Seeing Romare Bearden, seeing the Rivera work, both of those at the Art Institute, seeing prints that [00:12:00] my mother had of Kathe Kollwitz.
Kathe Kollwitz was a great German expressionist printmaker. and pacifist, and lost two children to World Wars, and she was, she was very inspiring to me. The works of the, both the Harlem Renaissance and the Taller de la Grafica Popular in Mexico. I knew several people in the Taller de la Grafica Popular that I befriended in Mexico, Alberto Beltran. And, uh, Rina Lasso and Arturo Bustos, they were all my friends. So those works and the work of Alfredo Sal, who I was fortunate to become friends with. And then I have to say, the great black muralist, John Biggers from Houston. So all of those, the people, those people's works. I would say, you know, in the tradition, narrative traditions of social resistance.[00:13:00]
I have to say that for me, the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area is the corner of Mission and 24th Street. It feels to me sort of like a center of the universe, like the Zocalo in Mexico City, where you see all of these eras. and origins of people coming together in one place at one time. It's incredibly effervescent and has a deep history and is the center of a lot of social and cultural movement.
Host Emily Wilson: Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Art is Awesome. And thanks to our guest, Juana Alicia. You can get more information and link to her work in our show notes. Me Llaman Calle, the monumental art of Juana Alicia is at the San Francisco Arts Commission, main gallery on Van Ness through September [00:14:00] 23rd,
please subscribe and rate us wherever you get your podcasts. Our next episode will feature Trina, Michelle Robinson, an artist whose work explores memory and migration through photos, videos, and stories. Trina is one of the artists included in the Yerba Buena center for the arts Bay area. Now exhibition on view October 6th through next May.
Art is Awesome is a bi weekly podcast dropping every other Tuesday. It was created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene Gotu of Gotu Productions. Our theme music is provided by Kevin MacLeod with [00:15:00] Incompetech Music. Be sure to follow us on social media or visit our website.
Till next time.[00:16:00]