We recently connected with Juana Alicia Araiza and have shared our conversation below.

Juana Alicia, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

The most meaningful project I’ve worked on was the collaborative MAESTRAPEACE mural on The San Francisco Women’s Building, with six other women artists: Miranda Bergman, Edythe Boone, Susan Kelk Cervantes, Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton and Irene Perez. We worked together to create a five-story set of two murals on the north and east facades of the iconic building that serves women and woman-identified people in the San Francisco Mission District. Our multi-generational, multi-ethnic team worked harmoniously for several years to paint both the exterior and interior walls of this important center for women’s services, activism and rights. In 2018, we published a beautiful, coffee-table art book on mural, its history and process and on the artists themselves, through Heyday Books: MAESTRAPEACE: San Francisco’s Monumental Feminist Mural. The book features an introduction by Angela Y. Davis, and poetry by Alice Walker, Leticia Hernández and many other acclaimed poets.

Juana Alicia, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a working artist, and for much of my life, I taught in academia as well. I have created many murals in acrylic paint, fresco, mosaic tile and now, in glass. Most of my work is in the San Francisco Bay Area and Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico, though I have also painted murals in other parts of the United States and Latin America. I grew up in Detroit and was exposed to Diego Rivera’s murals at the Detroit Art Institute, which immediately drew me to the medium and the ideas of social narrative in visual art. I was also strongly influenced by my mentor, Dr. Cledie Collins Taylor, African art historian and sculptor/jeweler. In my late teens I got involved in making posters for the United Farm Workers Union and was recruited by the great labor organizer, Cesar Chavez, to work with the union in Salinas, California, where I began my life as an activist artist.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

We are all intertwined as artists, creatives, ecosystem and society. Social systems need to create spaces and funding for artists as an integrated sector of the education, health, science, industrial design, urban planning and many other disciplines. Artists are often the visionary conscience of society, and as we are in an existential climate emergency, artists can provide alternative perspectives for expressing the ideas that will transform our society. As Dr. King said so eloquently: ” We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

I believe that we must shift from the thing-oriented to the nature oriented, moving from a human-centered to a gaia-centered analysis and vision of our roles and place in the universe. As an artist, I seek to affirm that vision.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

For me, the most rewarding aspect of being an artist is the learning process that each project immerses me in. It is the research, the oral histories, interviews and interactive process with each community that I work for or collaborate with that stimulates my intellectual and creative life. Whether that has meant working in a revolutionary war zone in Nicaragua or with migrant farmworker youth, or with the Mayan communities of the Yucatán, each mural or illustration project has exposed me to other worldviews and ways of thinking, feeling. The reward is the inner expansiveness for myself as an individual artist, and hopefully, the benefit of both process and product the artwork brings to each community.

Contact Info:

• Website: juanaalicia.com
• Instagram: juana_alicia
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/juanaaliciamuralista
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juana-alicia-6b032650/
• Twitter: Juana Alicia @juanaaliciaa
• Youtube: Juana Alicia Araiza @juanaaliciaaraiza8796

Image Credits
Photo by Alexa Treviño [email protected]