La Madre Tonantsin

3495 16th Between Sanchez and Dehon
Castro District

Colette Crutcher is a multi discipline artist. Her career began with painting and printmaking, but now covers a broad spectrum, from very large to very small, from public to intensely personal, from abstract to figurative, and across a range of media: painting and drawing, collage, assemblage, paper mache, concrete, ceramic and mosaics.

According to Collete’s website: This mural is a renovation of La Madre Tonantsin, a similar mural I painted there in 1991. The original fence was rotting, and along with it the mural. A grassroots fundraising campaign, helped by a grant from Precita Eyes, enabled me to create this new version. Rather than sticking to paint alone, I incorporated a variety of semi-sculptural media. (The mural was done in 1998)

The piece was made for the headquarters of the Instituto Pro Musica, an organization dedicated to the performance of music old and new from Spain and Latin America. I sing with their choral group, Coro Hispano de San Francisco, and used my artwork to express feelings evoked by this powerful musical heritage. The goddess represented is Tonantsin, the mother of the Aztec gods. I am not particularly well-versed in pre-Columbian religious practices; I just used the theme as a springboard for my imagination.