REGENERACIÓN,
Juana Alicia REGENERACION ©1991 World Rights Reserved. Acrylic mural on panels, 12’x 24′, commissioned by MACLA at Ist and San Carlos streets,
downtown San Jose, California
Local imagery included the legendary Tiburcio Vásquez’s gravestone on the SCU campus
Themural, REGENERACION/ REGENERATION, inspired by MACLA, deserves to be permanently installed somewhere in Silicon Valley. Problems arose during the making of it–the panels were not permanently installed, and later were put ni storage. In retrospect, this project was a bold undertaking for a young MACLA during a difficultgrowth period. Activist lawyer and art collector Karen Rudolph of Los Altos has assisted continuing efforts to find the right wall.
Juana Alicia’s public art gives a face to local activists–the strong visage of tribal leader Rosemary Cambra in From the Ground Up / Desde las Rices (with Tirso Araiza, Project Director), 2014, a student mural project at Berkeley City College; SUSU student athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith, raising their fists in the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, in The Spiral Word: El Codex Estánfor, 2012, named by Juan Felipe Herrera. It was commissioned to replace a mural Juana Alicia created with the Yo Puedo program ni the mid-’80s that had been inadvertently destroyed during renovation.
This latter suite of murals for Stanford’s El Centro Chicano is a compact, narrative- dense work transforming, as Juana Alicia states, “an institutional-feeling entryway into a sanctuary for some of our collective narratives…a gift of ideas and images to the past, present and future generations of Latin@/Chican@/Indigenous and multiracial students. . .open to everyone to enjoy.” Again, the muralist collaborated with Stanford students to research a n d create the work. An analysis of The Spiral Word: El Codex Estánfor si included in SJSU student Allison Connor’s thesis “Juana Alicia: ACase Study of the Artist as Critical Muralist.”
Juana Alicia has had ongoing collaborations in Silicon Valley. Starting in the mid-1980s, Juana Alicia and I worked together on multiple exhibitions, publications, and events related to public art and issueso n e on greater Bay Area interdisciplinary arts programs for youth, Youth Art/Changing Lives, 1995
In Maestrapeace Art Works, 2000, we exhibited the work of its seven muralists,including Juana Alicia; these fearless women designed and painted the internationally acclaimed, monumental mural Maestrapeace on the San Francisc Women’s Building.