Maceo montoya murals for kids

Malaquias Montoya began the Mexican and Chicano Mural Workshop at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) in 1980. Already a prolific muralist in the California Bay Area, Montoya sought to create a curriculum where students could participate in the creation of community art that both challenged and empowered its viewers. Greatly influenced by Mexican Muralism and Los Tres Grandes (Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros), Chicano Muralists sought to tell the stories of their community on the walls of their neighborhoods. In this tradition, Montoya’s classes painted murals on schools, community centers, drug prevention centers, food co-ops, and storefronts throughout the East Bay, addressing issues as wide-ranging as education, health, and the numbing effects of mass media, to wars in Central America.

In 1989, Montoya left CCAC for the Chicana/o Studies Department at the University of California, Davis, where the mural workshop, along with t