Connecting Art and Community: Susan Cervantes and Precita Eyes
If you’ve spent any time in San Francisco, you’ve likely noticed the bold, colorful murals around the Mission District. With more than 700 in the neighborhood alone, they’re impossible to miss. But you might not know how they got there. Behind them is Precita Eyes, the community mural organization founded by Susan Kelk Cervantes, a quiet force transforming neighborhood walls into community stories.
Cervantes grew up in Dallas in a creative household where her parents ran a nursery and her grandmother painted ceramics. “When you’re around that kind of creative activity, you feel that it’s part of who you are,” she says. At 16, she arrived in San Francisco with big dreams and a scholarship to the California School of Fine Arts, one of only two art degree programs in the country.
The youngest in her class and one of only a few women, she immersed herself in painting. “I turned my room into a studio and started painting in oils, Cervantes recalls. I was painting almost every day — sometimes a canvas a day. I felt like I had so much freedom, and I just jumped right in. “Painting was my passion.”
Even then, Susan was drawn to painting on a large scale. One day, she spotted the Diego Rivera mural, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City (1931) on a wall at the Institute, partially hidden beneath a cloth because her professor “thought it wasn’t contemporary enough.” While she admired Rivera, Cervantes says she was more inspired by her experiences and instincts than his work and the abstract expressionism that was dominant at the school at the time.
“I was really different,” she told me. “My thing was that to do something original, it had to come from inside of me. So everything I did was from my imagination.”
Her first step toward murals came in 1965, when she painted a restaurant wall at 22nd and Valencia in exchange for food. “I never expected to paint murals—it wasn’t even something we studied,” she says. “But I always liked painting really big.” At the time, murals were largely unheard of in San Francisco.
By the early 1970s, however, the Mujeres Muralistas—the first all-female muralist collective in the U.S.—were changing that. Cervantes was inspired by watching Patricia Rodriguez, Graciela Carrillo, Consuelo Mendez, and Irene Perez create Latinoamérica on the Mission Hiring Hall. “I used to watch them paint every day, bring them refreshments, and document their work,” she remembers. “Seeing women on scaffolding, getting paid, doing monumental work—it was inspiring.” Soon after, they handed her a brush and asked her to help them paint their mural at Paco’s Tacos on 24th Street. That moment, paired with their encouragement, convinced her to bring the same collaborative energy to the Precita Valley Community Center, where she had been teaching art classes as a volunteer.
“I remember Patricia Rodriguez, who just passed away recently, coming over to me saying, ‘We can help you get something started over there’.” And so they hooked me up with a program that donated paint. We did everything on plywood panels that would fit along the front façade. We put a workshop flyer out, and about 17 people came to participate in designing, planning, and painting the mural.”
The result was Masks of God, Soul of Man, later displayed at the Bernal Heights Library. It was the first multicultural mural Cervantes directed, created by a diverse group of people across ages, backgrounds, and experiences. That project set the precedent for Precita Eyes.
In 1977, Cervantes and her husband Luis formally established Precita Eyes Muralists Association, one of only a handful of community mural centers in the country. Their early works—Masks of God, Soul of Man, Every Child Is Born to Be a Flower, Family Life and Spirit of Mankind—all carried forward the Mujeres Muralistas’ ethos of collaborative design, cultural pride, and grassroots empowerment.
That model is the foundation for Precita Eyes’ projects across San Francisco and beyond. In 1994, Cervantes joined six women artists to create MaestraPeace, the six-story mural on the Women’s Building that celebrates women’s contributions across centuries and cultures. Later works include Soul Journey (2008), a mosaic honoring African American history in Bayview, and The Bay (2019), a 42-foot mosaic on the Chase Center celebrating the people, places, and landmarks of the region. Her reach extended internationally as well: in 1997, she and her family led workshops in Moscow, painting two 70-foot murals with students and parents at a Jewish day school, and later taught the collaborative mural process in China.
It’s the Precita Eyes Way. “You work with the community you’re serving,” Cervantes explains. “They’re first and foremost, because they are your inspiration. We’re basically facilitating the process so they can feel like they’re designing and planning their own mural and maybe even have the opportunity to paint with us.”
Today, Precita Eyes is more than a muralist collective. It’s a cultural hub offering toddler and youth programs, adult workshops, mural tours, a community store where they sell their custom mural paint colors, and mentorships where volunteers work alongside lead artists before directing projects of their own.
“A lot of the people in the communities we serve are not artists,” Cervantes says. “But once they experience that kind of collaboration, they start to see themselves differently. They bond with each other, and with their environment, in a way that can be transformative.” For her, that’s the power of murals. “Any time you can claim a space and express yourself in it, no matter what the image or issues might be, is claiming the space for the people. That act alone is an activist or a social change action,” she says.
Precita Eyes Muralists Association
2981 24th St., San Francisco, CA 94110
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