Juana Alicia Araiza

The Spill/El Derrame

Acrylic mural on stucco

Corner of Emerson and Adeline Streets in Berkeley, California across from Ashby BART Station. Assisted by Keena Romano. Sponsored by BAMFest 2016, the Bay Area Mural Festival, a project of La Peña Cultural Center, with support from the California Arts Council.

" As a muralist, printmaker and painter, I try to communicate my vision for a better world as well as projecting a resounding critique of the systems that destroy the earth, women, people of color, persons with disabilities, migrants, climate refugees, all of us. I use murals and printmaking to make the images accessible to a wide public: to the folks in the streets, at demonstrations, or just going about their lives, struggling, loving, suffering, rejoicing. You’ll be walking down the street, and pow! A building becomes a song, a film on walls, an alternative vision to the commercialism bombarding us from billboards to our telephones. The wall opens a door to new possibilities.

Some of my murals are wake-up calls, shockers, like the Spill mural in central Berkeley. There are also spaces where my murals celebrate hope...."

– Juana Alicia Araiza

About the artist

Juana Alicia Araiza

Juana Alicia has been creating murals and working as a printmaker, sculptor, illustrator, and studio painter for over thirty years. Her style, akin to genres of contemporary Latin American literary movements, can be characterized as magical and social realism, and her work addresses issues of social justice, gender equality, environmental crisis, and the power of resistance and revolution.

The artist has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Windcall Residency, Master Muralist Award (Precita Eyes), Woman of Fire Award, among other recognitions, and her sculptural and painted public commissions (individual and collaborative) can be seen in Nicaragua, Mexico, Pennsylvania and in many parts of California, most notably in San Francisco. They include SANARTE at U.C.S.F. Medical Center, SANTUARIO at the San Francisco International Airport, LA LLORONA'S SACRED WATERS at 24th and York Streets in the Mission of San Francisco, the MAESTRAPEACE mural of the San Francisco Women’s Building, and GEMELOS at the Metropolitan Technical University in Mérida, Mexico.

Juana Alicia, in collaboration with her sister muralists, has recently published MAESTRAPEACE: San Francisco’s Monumental Feminist Mural, through Heyday Books, and is now collaborating with Tirso G. Araiza on a graphic novel, La X’Taabay.currently illustrating a graphic novel by Tirso Araiza, as well as creating monumental graphic street art, based on the rich Yucatec Mayan folktale, LA X'TAABAY. Tirso has reinterpreted the story as a contemporary, eco-feminist tale of the struggle between modern “civilization” and nature, between men and women, between religion and indigenous tradition, between reason and dream. He has written the text, and she has created some thirty of the fifty expected illustrations, with no funding. With this graphic work, she hopes to begin a new chapter in her work and its reach as an artist.

She was the recipient of the Golden Capricorn Award from the San Francisco Arts Commission, which included a solo exhibition at the SFAC Main Gallery in 2022, and was awarded a Eureka Fellowship for 2021.