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country. According to executive director Shoshana
Rosenberg, the building provides meeting space and such
services as rape counseling, job training, and legal aid to
over 1,000 women each week. It hosts aerobic and selfdefense
classes, shelters dozens of nascent projects, and is
also home to the San Francisco National Organization
for Women (NOW).This "room of our own community"
is located in a four-story landmark building in San Francisco's
predominantly Hispanic Mission district.
The muralists chosen—with over 100 years of combined
experience—seized the opportunity to reclaim
women's history with openly, powerful images from
women's culture that patriarchal societies have long suppressed.
High above the doorway on the building's
entrance facade, a seated nude goddess with butterflywings
sits, pregnant with girl-child. The goddess holds
the sun on high: below her cascade streams of water, alive
with fish. She's the single fantasy goddess of the piece,
created by Susan Kelk Cervantes to embody light and
life-giving energy. "All women can learn to have control
over their own destinies. She holds the sun [symbolizing]
that potential," says the artist.
The procreative goddess, culturally subversive in her
unabashedly uneroticized corporalicy, provoked an early
challenge: The San Francisco Landmarks Preservation
Advisory Board found her out of character with the historic
building facade and threatened to block municipal
funding of the project. As repeated delays threatened the
project's implementation (dependent on much donated
labor), "We called in the press," says Cervantes. Opposi-
The heads of Nobel Laureate Rigoberta
Menchu (center), a Laplander (left) and an
Asian American woman (right) frame the
mural designed by seven artists: (left to
right) Juana Alicia, Miranda Bergman,
Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton, Irene Perez,
Susan Kelk Cervantes and Edythe Boone.
tion dissipated with the painstaking demonstration that
paints could be removed.
The completed Maestrapeace, which covers two 65' by
80' window-punctuated walls of the building at 18th
Street near Valencia, illustrates the contributions of
women throughout history from all parts of the world
and the healing power of women's wisdom over time.
The roughly 12,000 square foot (including gables), colorsaturated
painting rises to heights where only a few core
muralists ventured, atop seven and a half levels of scaffolding.
"It's very big, it's very public, it's beautiful—a
spectacular visual celebration," said Tim Drescher, muralist,
teacher, and author of San Francisco Murals: Community
Creates Its Muse.
The "San Francisco seven" muralists worked collaboratively
for nearly a year and a half along with about fifty
volunteers to complete the two-part mural. They are carrying
on a community-painting tradition that dates back
to the New Deal era work of Diego Rivera and the thirty-odd
Coit Tower muralists, four of whom were women.
Women have been leaders in this city's community-mural
movement since the late 1960s, when mural-making
ON THE ISSUES WINTER 1995