Juana Alicia

Juana Alicia (born 1953) is an American muralist, printmaker, educator, activist and, painter. She has been an educator for forty years. Juana Alicia, as part of the faculty Berkeley City College, founded and directed the True Colors Public Art program. Her sculptures and murals are principally located in the San Francisco Bay Area, Nicaragua, Mexico, Pennsylvania, and in many parts of California. She also worked for Interharvest, a United Fruit-owned lettuce company. She worked up until September 1976 in the fields but then stopped because at the time she was seven months pregnant with her son and was exposed to pesticide poisoning.

Art & chronology Alicia's painting style is colorful, complex and dynamic. Through her art, she attempts to convey a sense of shared humanity and appreciation for the environment. The building the mural is painted on is a Mexican meat market and the owner specified that they wanted a mural that had something to do with food.

Alto al Fuego/Cease Fire (1988) Alicia's Alto al Fuego is a mural which deals with the subject of violence.

True Colors Mural Project Juana Alicia is the founder and director of the True Colors Mural Project. True Colors is a public mural program at Berkeley City College. Through her Mural Design and Creation course at BCC, and also in collaboration with the City of Berkeley's Youth Works Program, Earth Island Institute and other community-based organizations. True Colors helps create one or more public murals each year. This project aims to support the development of young artists and activists for the improvement of the urban environment through a creation and collaboration of public murals. The purpose of the murals is to both educate urban residents. Also, beautify the urban environment with positive messages and images that advocate for ecological sustainability, conservation and restoration. The project recruits, engages and employs under-served, at risk youth from Berkeley and the greater East Bay, in vital community environmental mural arts projects. True Colors trains young artists to design and create community murals with social and environmental justice themes.

The ESAY/Fulbright Project Juana Alicia works and has worked in Mérida, Yucatán, México at the Escuela Superior de Arte de Yucatán (ESAY) where she is teaching workshops in Chicano Mural History, Design and Technique. The workshops will finish in a mural at the university's new location, in the neo-Mayan art deco train station. Which is an architectural landmark in downtown Mérida. ESAY is a multidisciplinary arts university, featuring visual arts, music, theater, dance and film/multimedia.

The Spiral Voice: Codex Estánfor Juana Alicia's New Murals at Stanford In 2007, Stanford's Centro Chicano wrote to Juana Alicia, offering a new commission for the Centro. Since a mural that she had created with the Yo Puedo Program during the mid-eighties had been destroyed during a renovation. The Centro requested that she create a new work of art in its place. After touring the site, Juana Alicia drew up several proposals for the exterior and interior walls. She proposed an exterior mural that resembled her work she had recently created for the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center in San Francisco and in Mexico at the Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana (UTM). She began the process by creating new murals for the Centro Chicano. The theme of the murals depicted the legacy of Latin American and Indigenous literature. The working title for the piece is Ojas de nuestro legado/Pages from Our Legacies, a play on the words pages of a book and the ojas or pencas del nopal.

San Francisco State Rebound Project Collaboration in 2018, in collaboration with the San Francisco Rebound Project as well as Alicia's BCC's True Mural Colors Project created a mural at SF State's campus. The name of the mural was Incarceration to Liberation / De la Encarcelación a la Liberación. The artwork focuses on the experience of life inside the prison industrial system and paints a positive image of life after being behind bars. As sponsored by SFSU's Rebound Project, a specific department at SF State that offers special admission to ex-convicts, the mural speaks to this particular community as well as the wider university student body and faculty. Ultimately, the mural placed on the San Francisco State University campus will be used to raise awareness of this organization and garner support for it. As stated by the SFSU website, "Project Rebound is a special admissions program assisting formerly incarcerated individuals who might not normally qualify for university acceptance because of application deadlines and minor academic deficiencies."

Awards 1982 – National Endowment for the Humanities, BIRTH MURAL Best Visual Art Work with a Chicano/Mexicano Theme, through the University of California, Santa Cruz. 1992 – Precita Eyes Mural Arts Center, Master Muralist Award. 1992 – Distinguished Visiting Professor, Oakes College, University of California, Santa Cruz. 1993 – NACS (National Association of Chicano Studies), for Outstanding Contributions to the Arts, Academia and Our Communities. 2000 – Woman of Fire Award, Women of Color Resource Center, Berkeley, Ca. 2004 – California State Senate, Outstanding Contributions as an Oakland Arts Educator. 2006-2007 – Fulbright Fellowship, Escuela Superior de Arte de Yucatán (ESAY), Visiting Professor in Mural Arts/Painting. 2020 – San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC), Golden Capricorn Award

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