San Francisco is home to about 3000 murals. They adorn high schools, businesses and the walls of mini-parks, and are painted by school kids, teenagers, gang members and professional artists. Most contemporary ones are in the Mission.
Since 1971, this area has been home to an extraordinary flourishing of muralism. It began with the Mujeres Muralistas, a woman’s collective that grew out of both the American Civil Rights movement and Mexican muralist movement led by Diego Rivera.
In the area where I was born and raised, there is one remaining independent art school. This is because of the restructuring of Australian art schools that happened almost thirty years ago, a process that saw most independent institutions affiliate themselves with the major universities. The mergers, part of a reform policy by federal education minister John Dawkins, aimed to heighten the ‘international competitiveness’ and ‘national economic development’ of the tertiary education sector, and came just after free education was abolished in 1989.