Murals cover nearly every garage door, fence, and wall around you in the alley that launched the Mission District's mural movement. Balmy Alley runs one block between 24th and 25th Streets, and nearly every garage door, fence, and wall in the alley is covered with murals. The tradition began in 1984 when a group of Chicana and Chicano artists, working with the organization PLACA, painted murals throughout the alley in response to the political violence of Central American dictatorships that was driving the wave of refugees arriving in the Mission at that time.
The murals addressed political repression, immigration, indigenous rights, and the daily life of the neighborhood — a tradition directly descended from the Mexican muralist movement of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Rivera himself worked in San Francisco in the 1930s; his San Francisco murals are still visible at City College and the San Francisco Art Institute. Balmy Alley murals are changed and restored regularly; the alley is never static.
Walk slowly the full length of the alley and read what the walls say. The 24th Street corridor surrounding this block has the highest concentration of murals in the city — hundreds of works across dozens of blocks, covering every surface where artists could get permission to paint.