Those who have visited the mural workshops or exhibits at Precita Eyes recently may have noticed unassuming walls covered in plastic drapes, serving as a humble background for artwork and exhibitions.
But hidden behind the drapes, a mural created 24 years ago has been waiting to see the light of day again.
Next Saturday, the “Suns of San Francisco” mural will be unveiled to the public in an open studio and celebration at 2981 24th St. from 3 to 5 p.m. The restoration, led by Kerra Hendrickson and Gabi Moreta, took a dozen students and volunteers working over the past three months.
The mural follows the sun and the development of written language, and is about 80 feet long, spanning four walls.
Its major scene depicts figures from different cultures sitting around a fire in a coastal cave looking outward. The figures include a Northern Mexico shaman creating a yarn painting of the sun, the father of the Cherokee language, a Pomo woman who is gathering reeds for basket weaving, and Kui Xing, the Chinese god of literature.
“It has a certain kind of energy that is really positive and uplifting,” said Susan Cervantes, director of Precita Eyes Muralists. “It’s sort of like our sanctuary.”
The original mural was designed in 1991 and intended for a University of California, San Francisco, building on Harrison Street, but the commission fell through.
“We were disappointed, but that was just before we got this building,” Cervantes recalled. A few years later, in 1998, Precita Eyes Muralists purchased its current space on 24th Street. “So it was like, ‘Well, we’ve got a wall here, we can transfer this design [here] and it would make us feel better.’”
So muralists at the time got to work. But before finishing, around the year 2000, the organization started to use the space as a gallery for exhibitions. Some artists wanted a clean slate as a background to offset their artwork, so plastic drapes started to cover the wall. On Dia De Los Muertos, for example, the wall is covered in black drapes and artists put altars in the front.
“We would just keep adding layers, so people kind of forgot that there was this mural back there,” Cervantes said.
Cervantes did not forget. But when she decided to restore the mural earlier this year, she knew it would be complicated. The bottom portion of the wall, for instance, had deteriorated after water damage years ago and became too crumbly for paint application.
“The damage was disheartening,” said Moreta, one of the project lead. “Years of exhibitions and blindly nailing art into the wall had almost destroyed every image at eye level.”
Every Friday and on some Wednesdays for three months, students and volunteers at Precita Eyes looked for flaws in the surface: Chipped paint, faded colors, unpatched holes.
But the painting days were also filled “with great conversation, tons of learning, and eating baked goods from our neighboring panaderías,” said Hendrickson, who assembled the group of volunteers for the restoration. For some, it’s the first mural project they have worked on.
“Oh, they are having a good time,” Cervantes said. “We have murals they can assist us with to get started and learn how the process works, and eventually they may even end up leading a project themselves.”
The muralists who originally made the design back in 1991 may never know about the restored mural, though. Even Cervantes doesn’t quite remember who participated back then.
But she looks forward to one of the old volunteers stumbling into the studio and discovering the restored mural. “It’s always amazing to see people from the past come through again and talk about the times when they had contributed,” she said.
“We want to have a little celebration,” Cervantes added. “And then it may end up getting draped again.”
