Juana Alicia on Murals, Memory, and Who Gets to Be a Hero

What do you do when the man you painted thirty feet tall on the side of an elementary school turns out to have a history you can no longer celebrate?In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with legendary Chicana muralist, educator, and activist Juana Alicia — co-creator of Maestrapeace, the iconic five-story mural on San Francisco's Women's Building, and one of the most consequential public artists of the last half century — for a sweeping conversation about collective authorship, cultural memory, gentrification, and the ethics of erasure.Juana Alicia traces her path from cutting paper dolls on the kitchen floor in Detroit, to the Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts, to the picket lines of the United Farm Workers Union, where she says she received "the most foundational education I could have received." She talks about her artistic godmother, Dr. Cledie Collins Taylor, and about learning from members of Mexico's Taller de Gráfica Popular. She recounts painting a solidarity mural in Managua during the Contra War, and the arranged marriage of seven women artists who decided — without permission or budget — to paint an entire building.