Las Milagrosas – Balmy Alley, Mission District, San Francisco, California

Las Milagrosas is a mural on Balmy Alley, painted by Mary Nash in 2001. It pays tribute to four politically engaged women artists of the 20th century. Unfortunately, this mural is in considerable disrepair.

The mural depicts (from left to right):

Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz (1867-1945) a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, and war. In 1933, after the establishment of the Nazi regime, the authorities forced her to resign her place on the faculty of the Akademie der Künste and banned her from exhibiting her work. In July 1936, she and her husband were visited by the Gestapo, who threatened her with arrest and deportation to a Nazi concentration camp. However, Kollwitz was by now a figure of international note, and no further action was taken.

Elizabeth Catlett Mora (1915-2012) was an African American sculptress and printmaker. Catlett is best known for the black, expressionistic sculptures and prints she produced during the 1960s and 1970s, which are seen as politically charged

Tina Modotti (1896-1942) was an Italian photographer, model, silent film actress, and revolutionary activist who once playfully described her profession as men.

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was a Mexican painter who achieved great international popularity. Kahlo’s paintings made use of vibrant colours and a style that was influenced by indigenous cultures of Mexico as well as such European influences as Realism, Symbolism, and Surrealism. Many of her works are self-portraits that symbolically express her own pain. Her work has been celebrated in Mexico as emblematic of national and indigenous tradition and by feminists for its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form. Kahlo was married to the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and shared his left-wing politics. Their marriage was tempestuous since Kahlo and Rivera both had volatile temperaments and numerous extramarital affairs.