Three Sacred Colours – Balmy Alley, Mission District, San Francisco, California

This mural-sculpture is located at the beginning of Balmy Alley. Balmy Alley runs between 25th and 24th streets in the Mission District, between Harrison and Treat. This block long alley is one of several great alleys in San Francisco with a highly concentrated collection of murals. The murals began in the mid-80’s as an outlet for artists’ outrage over human rights and political abuses in Central America. Today the alley contains murals on a myriad of styles and subjects from human rights to local gentrification and Hurricane Katrina.

"The Five Sacred Colors of Corn" is a mural created in 1991 by Susan Kelk Cervantes, Mia Gonzales and others. Susan Cervantes is one of the founders of the Precita Eyes Muralists Association and a member of "Las Mujeres Muralistas," the first all-women group of collaborative muralists. The mural features wooden sculptural elements and is inspired by traditional yarn paintings of the Huichol, an indigenous people who live in the Sierra Madre Occidental range in the western Mexican states of Nayarit, Jalisco, Zacatecas, and Durango.

For thousands of years, the vital staple of corn has been grown and celebrated by the indigenous peoples of Mexico and North America. Sacred rituals have connected the planting and harvesting of "maize" to weather, the gods, and the seasons, demonstrating the interwoven relationship between the people and the cycles of nature. The sustaining seeds and kernels hold both life and meaning for these communities. Part of the mural displays these words (in both Spanish and English): "The birth of a silence is written in the agony of a sigh"