DIGITAL MURALS
Digital Murals
Digital Mural Project, Galería de la Raza
Location: 24th & Bryant Streets, Mission District, San Francisco, CA
The Digital Mural Project at Galería de la Raza emerged at the intersection of tradition and innovation. For over 30 years, the corner of 24th and Bryant Streets served as the site of rotating hand-painted temporary murals, a celebrated space where Chicanx and Latinx artists addressed issues of community, resistance, and cultural identity through public visual expression. This mural wall—located on the exterior of Galería de la Raza—became a defining feature of the Mission District’s visual and political landscape.
In 1998, artist John Jota Leaños created the first digital mural for this site, marking a shift in both medium and method. In collaboration with then-Galería curator Carolina Ponce de León, Leaños co-founded the Digital Mural Program, which reimagined the tradition of socially engaged muralism through digital media. The program invited artists working across disciplines—graphic design, photography, digital illustration, video stills, and beyond—to produce high-resolution, computer-generated murals printed and installed on the same historic wall.
This evolution retained the radical ethos of the original hand-painted program while expanding access to artists exploring new forms of image-making. The Digital Mural Project became a decolonized counter-advertising platform, challenging dominant media narratives and elevating Latinx, Indigenous, and other marginalized voices in public space.
The program engaged local and international artists whose works addressed topics such as displacement, border violence, queer identity, Afro-Latinx heritage, and the cultural afterlives of colonialism. It served not only as a site of resistance but also as a laboratory for experimenting with how digital art could function critically in urban space.
The program concluded when Galería de la Raza was evicted from its longtime home in 2019, but its influence endures—as a model for digital-era muralism, as an archive of Latinx cultural expression, and as a bold intervention into the politics of space, memory, and representation.
The Mission Y2K? A History of Displacement
Digital Mural by John Jota Leaños with students from San Francisco School of the Arts
Location: Galería de la Raza, 24th & Bryant Streets, Mission District, San Francisco
The Mission Y2K? was an early digital mural and research-based public art project created by John Jota Leaños in collaboration with students from the San Francisco School of the Arts (SOTA). Commissioned for the Digital Mural Program at Galería de la Raza, the work critically engaged with cycles of displacement, cultural erasure, and community resistance in San Francisco’s historic Mission District.
Displayed on the iconic digital billboard at 24th and Bryant from November 1999 to March 2000, the mural juxtaposed speculative Y2K anxieties with deep historical narratives—offering a visual timeline of resistance, from Spanish colonization to gentrification fueled by the first dot-com boom.
Drawing on archival research, oral histories, and community memory, the project explored the ways in which economic forces—past and present—have reshaped the social fabric of the Mission. The mural’s aesthetic merged the visual language of advertising with muralism, using large-scale digital printing to challenge commercial visual culture and reclaim public space for political storytelling.
Historical Context
This project was grounded in a collaborative inquiry into the political histories often omitted from dominant urban narratives. Students and artist-researchers uncovered episodes of cultural violence and resistance that reverberated across centuries—from the Ohlone people's flight from Mission Dolores in 1795, to the whitewashing of Chuy Campusano’s mural, to the displacement caused by BART construction and the criminalization of lowrider culture. These micro-histories collectively illuminated a larger pattern: the repeated expulsion of communities of color under the banners of progress and revitalization.
The Mission District, long a working-class immigrant neighborhood, has served as a vital cultural hub—shaped by Indigenous presence, Latinx migration, and Afro-diasporic influence. In the face of systemic neglect and gentrification, the neighborhood has also remained a stronghold of community resistance. The Mission Y2K? placed this tension at the center of its digital canvas, reclaiming urban history as a living, contested terrain.
The project leveraged the Digital Mural Program’s experimental format—a departure from the long-standing tradition of hand-painted temporary murals at the Galería’s exterior wall. By adopting digital tools and billboard aesthetics, the work reimagined the mural site as a decolonial media space—one that could amplify erased histories and reframe the public’s relationship to urban transformation. Rather than offering a singular narrative, the mural became a curated palimpsest of documents, photographs, maps, and testimonies.
This approach encouraged viewers to reckon with the interwoven legacies of colonization, speculative development, forced removals, and the techno-utopian mythologies that helped fuel them.
Selected Archival Documents Featured in the Mural
1795: Ohlone Resistance – Spanish soldiers fail to recapture Ohlone who escaped Mission Dolores.
1969–71: BART on the Backs – Transit construction displaces businesses and working-class residents.
1975–80s: Lowrider Culture Targeted – Police suppression of Latino car culture in the Mission.
1990s: Gentrification Surge – Evictions, rent hikes, and cultural displacement across the district.
1998: Erasure of “Lilli Ann” Mural – Community response to the illegal whitewashing of a Chicano mural.
Dedica
The Mission Y2K? was dedicated to Jesús “Chuy” Campusano—a foundational muralist whose work, Lilli Ann, was illegally whitewashed in 1998—symbolizing the broader erasure of cultural memory from the urban landscape. The mural honored those erased, marginalized, or forgotten in official histories, and served as a collective act of digital remembrance.
Los Restos Coloniales Se Manifiestan en el Olvido
Los Restos Coloniales Se Manifiestan en el Olvido (1998)
Digital Mural by John Jota Leaños
Galería de la Raza, 24th & Bryant, San Francisco
Unveiled in 1998 as the inaugural piece of Galería de la Raza’s Digital Mural Program, Los Restos Coloniales Se Manifiestan en el Olvido (Colonial Remnants Manifest in Amnesia) marked a critical shift in the landscape of public art in the Mission District. Created by John Jota Leaños, the digital mural expanded the traditions of community-based muralism by introducing new media tools to interrogate ongoing colonial conditions.
The work engages how colonialism continues to manifest in contemporary life—not through overt occupation but via subtler technologies of control, including language policy (such as California’s anti-bilingual education legislation), spatial design (architecture and urban development), and visual representation (particularly the photographic objectification of the body). These mechanisms operate as instruments of historical erasure, flattening the complexities of cultural memory and social identity.
At the heart of the mural is the image of the “Oppositional Panel,” a powerful juxtaposition between a colonial-era photographic rendering of an Indigenous woman—subjected to early racial photometric systems—and a modern corporate figure—symbol of contemporary capitalist authority. This pairing raises critical questions: How are female bodies visually coded and controlled across time? What forms of complicity and resistance are embedded in the act of image-making? And how does visual culture participate in both reproducing and resisting power?
Set against the broader mural site—long known for hand-painted, temporary works that gave voice to Latinx, Indigenous, and immigrant communities—this digital intervention forged new ground. It honored the visual and political legacy of the Mission District’s muralismo, while confronting the arrival of a new digital era in which public space, cultural memory, and visual storytelling were being reshaped.
