Roamings of a Leo: Judy Baca and the Great Wall of Los Angeles

Judy Baca is a 68 year-old American Chicana artist who is a professor of Chicana/o Studies in the School of Social Science at U.C.L.A. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the Venice, California-based Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) a community arts center and creator of mural projects. She grew up on the Watts neighborhood of L.A. and remembers taking the Red Line street car by Watts Towers and watching the creator, Sam Rodia, at work. She then moved with her family to the Pacoima neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. She graduated from Cal. State Northridge with her B.A. and M.A. in Art. She decided she did not want to make art for galleries... "People in my family hadn't ever been in a gallery in their entire lives." She decided to study muralism at Taller Siqueiros in Cuernavaca, Mexico in the spirit of Diego Rivera.

After a brief job as a teacher in her former high school, she worked for the L.A. Parks and Recreation Dept. teaching art for a summer program in the public parks. She began working in Boyle Heights which had the most Mexican-Americans and the highest number of gangs in the country. She began using art to bridge the neighbor hood gangs though creating murals as a public voice and public consciousness. One mural is called Mi Abuelita, (My Grandmother) depicting a Mexican-American grandmother with her arms outstretched as if to give a hug. The community has loved this mural.

Her community organizing through murals continued and she was hired by the Army Corp of Engineers in 1974 to improve an area in the San Fernando Valley flood control channel called the Tujunga Wash. She engaged the community and hired youth from the delinquency programs to create a half mile long mural wall over several years. She met with the community to get ideas for the wall that would tell the stores of Los Angeles most unrecognized people. She then designed the wall with their assistance and began the process of transferring the designs to this giant wall. She had people from all ages and backgrounds working on the project. The mural depicts the history of California through several panels beginning with prehistory, colonialism, 19th and 20th centuries with histories of Native Americans and minorities. Baca has stated that the voices of disenfranchised communities need to be heard and the the preservation of a vital commons is critical to a health civil society.

Baca has created many other projects all over L.A., California and around the country. One of her projects is The World Wall: A Vision of the Future Without Fear, a painting that showed the world without violence. Various countries have contributed to this traveling exhibit including Russia, Israel/Palestine, Mexico and Canada. She created a mural showing Women Marathon runners painted on a wall along the 110 Freeway for the 1984 Olympics, "Our Land Has Memory for the Denver International Airport, Cesar Chavez Monument Plaza at San Jose State University, and the Robert F. Kennedy Learning Complex in L.A.

I strolled along the Tujunga Wash last Tuesday and enjoyed the Great Wall very much. You can find it by taking the Coldwater Avenue exit from the 101 Freeway, go North and once you cross Burbank Blvd. you will see a shaded walkway on the West side of the street where you can enjoy the creation of Judy Baca and hundreds of citizens of L.A. Since it is painted on the West side of the wash, it is best viewed before noon when the Sun is shining on it. But I enjoyed it in the afternoon as well.

Here are some photos of Judy Baca creations from the internet: