Artist Tirso Gonzalez and conservator Yano Rivera have won a Community Challenge Grant to restore six murals in and around the Mission's Balmy Alley — with the original artists coming back to work on their own pieces.

Artist Tirso Gonzalez and conservator Yano Rivera have been awarded a Community Challenge Grant for up to $129,294 to restore six murals in and around Balmy Alley — the Mission passage off 24th Street whose paintings, some dating to 1972, have been cracking and collecting graffiti faster than they can be addressed. Their plan, reported by Mission Local this week, calls for the original artists to come back and work on their own pieces.

The five Balmy Alley murals in the grant scope span five decades of the alley's history. Irene Perez will return to her 1972 "Coyolxauhqui has Something to Say," a depiction of the Aztec moon goddess that carries references to 500 years of indigenous resistance. Juana Alicia Araiza, who splits her time between Berkeley and Mexico, will restore her 1996 "No One Should Comply with an Immoral Law," which depicts El Salvador's Monseñor Óscar Romero — the archbishop murdered at his cathedral altar in San Salvador in 1980; that mural will also be relocated to a different wall within the alley. Betsie Miller-Kusz (1990's "Tierra de Amate Cielo de Amate"), Hector Escarramán (1995's "Icons of Mexican Art"), and Josue Rojas — whose 2012 "Enrique's Journey" depicts children riding atop La Bestia, the freight trains used by Central American migrants — complete the group. A sixth mural, in the mini-park at 24th and York streets, is also within the grant's scope.

The Community Challenge Grant was established by a 1991 voter initiative directing a portion of business gross-receipts taxes into neighborhood beautification. Mayor Daniel Lurie and City Administrator Carmen Chu announced this year's round on April 9: $3.3 million to 25 projects citywide. The Balmy Alley restoration's $129,294 sits close to the program's $150,000 cap.

"Every mural we lose, we lose our legacy and historical memory," Gonzalez, who has been part of San Francisco's art community since the 1980s, told Mission Local. Don Francisco, owner of Taqueria Vallarta, whose wall at the alley's entrance is a recurring graffiti surface, put the condition plainly: "This is our culture, and it's a shame because we are not presenting ourselves as well as we could."

Before brushes touch anything, Gonzalez and Rivera still need written approval from each property owner whose garage door or home wall carries a mural. Once that's secured, Gonzalez plans to paint the Taqueria Vallarta wall itself — currently the alley's most reliable graffiti target — with an original piece: a rural Jalisco landscape, the corn god, and a tribute to Mexican music in the Mission.

That wall, blank for now, is where someone walking into the alley will first see whether the restoration has actually started.