Balmy Alley

Most of the painted surfaces in Balmy Alley are walls, fences, and garage doors of private homes. No one gave the first artists a canvas here: they had to reach an agreement with every owner. It all began with children, for whom this narrow passage was the route between home and classes.

In the summer of nineteen seventy-two, the artist Mia Galaviz de Gonzalez ran a community learning center on 24th Street, almost directly across from the alley. She opened it after noticing that Spanish-speaking children were being diagnosed with “severe learning disabilities.” Mia did not believe that so many children were incapable of learning. At the center, they received help with homework and were taught music, theater, and drawing.

Many of the children lived in municipal housing behind Garfield Square and passed through Balmy Alley on their way to the center. Parents considered the passage unsafe. Mia found money for an art project, invited volunteers, obtained the owners’ permission, and assigned the children to paint the walls they walked past every day. They stopped being only students whom adults considered behind: now adults had to ask them what was depicted on the fence.

Mia shared the remaining paint with Patricia Rodriguez and Graciela Carrillo. The two emerging artists rented an apartment in house number fifty-four and were seeking the opportunity to work as muralists. They had no money for a project of their own, and male colleagues rarely invited women to take part in large outdoor murals. A neighbor allowed them to use a garage across from their apartment, a city commission lent them scaffolding, and residents added paint. Tropical plants, birds, and an enormous sphere with fish and branches appeared on the doors.

Their work was mocked by both men and women, but Irene Perez began painting in the alley after them, and then Consuelo Méndez joined the artists. This was how the Mujeres Muralistas collective came about—the first collective of Latin American women muralists. Its members received commissions far beyond the neighborhood and opened the way for other women who had previously been excluded from large public walls.

Mia’s children’s mural and the first tropical mural by Rodriguez and Carrillo have been destroyed. Above the garages to the left of house number ninety-three, a work by Irene Perez has survived; it appeared after theirs: two figures sit with their backs to one another. In the summer of two thousand twenty-six, Perez was invited to return and restore this mural—on the same alley where she first received a wall more than half a century ago.