Edythe Boone

Edythe (Edy) Boone, 79 years old, is an African-American artist and activist. She has worked as a muralist, counselor, and art teacher throughout her life in an under-served area in California. She is well known for the many murals she has painted. She started with her painted murals on each floor of a building in Harlem, New York and her work has expanded through the years to one of her most notable projects, designing and painting the Women's Building mural in San Francisco, California.

She is the aunt of Eric Garner, an African American man who was choked to death by New York Police Department officers. His death lead to protests and in part catalyzed the Black Lives Matter movement.

Boone is best known for her street murals in the San Francisco Bay Area which focus upon activist issues and the local community. Her topics have included the 1980s crack epidemic in America, AIDS, poverty, racial discrimination, and gender inequality.

Boone is perhaps most well-known for being one of the muralists behind the famous MaestraPeace mural on the Women's Building in San Francisco, California. The mural was created in 1994 by a cooperative of seven female artists, including Boone, Juana Alicia, Miranda Bergman, Susan Kelk Cervantes, Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton, and Irene Perez. The mural spans two walls and is five stories high. A few of the many images on it depict the Aztec Goddess of the Moon Coyolxauhqui, Palestinian legislator and activist Hanan Ashrawi, poet and activist Audre Lorde, painter Georgia O'Keeffe, Puerto Rican revolutionary Lolita Lebrón, and Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú. The mural is a major tourist attraction in the city's Mission District. It was restored in 2012 and Boone participated in the restoration.

MaestraPeace is notable not only for its massive scale and the numerous famous or mythical women it depicts, but for the multicultural and anti-colonialist sentiments expressed by artists of varying backgrounds. The piece represents "transhistorical, crosscultural and transnational connections between the African and indigenous cultures of the Americas" and its multicultural feminism suits the Women's Building's purpose and location in an ethnically diverse area.

Those We Love, We Remember, a mural to honor lost loved ones, was painted by Boone in Balmy Alley in San Francisco, CA.

In the 1980s, Boone and a group of "guerrilla" muralists worked on Oakland Wall Speaks with local housing project residents. The murals depict the effects of crack cocaine on the people who use it.

Near Berkeley's People's Park, Boone collaborated on the mural Let a Thousand Parks Bloom, an allusion to the peaceful demonstrations of 1969 that occurred in the park in protest of the Vietnam War.

"A New Color" is Marlene “Mo” Morris' directing debut. According to Morris, the film focuses on Edythe Boone's “illustrious career", stating “Edy has a way of inspiring people and embracing a number of causes”. The film debuted at the Mill Valley Film Festival on October 10, 2015.

Marlene Morris was a 2011 Berkeley Film Foundation grant winner for "A New Color", which allowed for half of the footage to be shot. In 2012, a Kickstarter campaign, created by Morris, raised $7,951 in additional funding for the film, while the East Bay Community Foundation pledged to match any funds that were raised.

Film Festivals Appearances