Street Art of San Francisco: Maestrapeace

*photos by Leo Hartshorn

Last week my wife and I took a short vacation to San Francisco. We love the city and the Bay area where we lived two different times for 7 years. When I was in seminary from 1975-78 we went to a congregation in SF in the Mission District. On our visit to SF last week we spent a day looking at murals in the Mission District. Earlier I had bought the book Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo edited by Annice Jacoby for Precita Eyes Muralists with a forward by Carlos Santana, which featured murals from the Mission District.

One of the murals I just had to see was the Maestrapeace mural covering the Women's building at 3543 18th Street . The multicultural mural was painted in 1994 by seven women, Juana Alicia, Miranda Bergman, Edythe Boone, Susan Kelk Cervantes, Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton, and Irene Perez and features many women figures, including Audre Lord, Georgia O'Keefe, and Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum. 500 women's names adorn the mural along with fabric patterns from diverse cultures around the world. It is an amazing mural!