Precita Eyes Muralists Association is a community-based non-profit muralist and arts education group located in the Mission District of San Francisco, California, founded in 1977 by Susan and Luis Cervantes.

Precita Eyes Muralists Association was founded in 1977 by Susan and Luis Cervantes who had come to the Bay Area several years before and started a family. Susan Cervantes herself had been inspired by “Las Mujeres Muralistas,” the first all-women group of collaborative muralists from which she applies her strategy of collaborative, accessible, community art.

The organization evolved from a community mural workshop in which the participants designed and painted the portable mural “Masks of God, Soul of Man” for the Bernal Heights Library. The group signed the piece as Precita Eyes Muralists because the project was a collaborative effort. The name of the organization comes from the fact that most of the muralists were from Precita Valley. Precita is a diminutive form of the Spanish word ‘presa,’ which means dam; the word ‘Precita’ means little dam. The ‘Eyes’ in the name are what we perceive the visual world with, our own eyes.

Kerry James Marshall (b. October 17, 1955) is an artist born in Birmingham, Alabama. He grew up in South Central Los Angeles and now lives in Chicago where he previously taught at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a 1978 graduate of Otis College of Art and Design.

Although he currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois, his time spent in Watts, Los Angeles, California where he observed the Black Power and Civil Rights movements had a significant impact on his paintings ). Strongly influenced by his experiences as a young man, he developed a signature style during his early years as an artist that involved the use of extremely dark, essentially black figures. These images represent his perspective of African Americans with separate and distinct inner and outer appearances. At the same time, they confront racial stereotypes within contemporary American society. This common theme appeared continuously in his work throughout the subsequent decades, especially in the 1980s and 1990s.