Balmy Alley, formally Balmy Street, runs one block between 24th and 25th streets near Garfield Square in the Mission District’s Calle 24 Latino Cultural District. Since the 1970s, most of the fences and garage doors along it have been painted with murals.

How it started

An SFMOMA essay says one of the alley’s first murals was a children’s project organized by Mia Galaviz de Gonzalez in 1972. Soon after, Graciela (Grace) Carrillo and Patricia Rodriguez painted a mural there with paint supplied by Galaviz de Gonzalez. Carrillo and Rodriguez were members of the collective that became known as Mujeres Muralistas. Their 1973 jungle and underwater scene is one of the earliest works in the alley.

PLACA

In 1984, artists Ray Patlán and Patricia Rodriguez, who both lived on the alley, recruited San Francisco artists for a project protesting U.S. intervention in the civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. They named it PLACA. SFMOMA says it was funded by a single $2,500 grant from the Zellerbach Family Foundation. Wikipedia’s account says the project added 27 murals by the summer of 1985.

Among the works SFMOMA describes are Herbert Sigüenza’s Después del triunfo (After the Triumph), Carlos “Kookie” Gonzalez’s Keeping the Peace in Central America, and Miranda Bergman and O’Brien Thiele’s Culture Contains the Seed of Resistance, Which Blossoms into the Flower of Liberation.

Still changing

As older murals faded, new ones took up other causes, including gentrification, Indigenous rights and women’s rights. Painting continues today, and the alley is recognized internationally as an example of activist art and as a destination for visitors. Remember that people live there and the garages are in use, so walk respectfully.

Nearby, see Clarion Alley and the Mission’s Día de los Muertos traditions.