In time for the 1984 Olympics, Judith Baca, with the help of 400 community youth and artists, completed The Great Wall of Los Angeles. The effort was coordinated by the Social and Public Art Resource Center or SPARC. Measuring at about a half mile long and 13 feet high, the work is credited as the longest hand painted mural in the world. Now, ahead of the 2028 Olympics, Baca will lead the effort to expand the original Great Wall of Los Angeles mural.
On July 14, the Museum of Latin American Art celebrated its grand reopening in a most extraordinary way, showing one of America’s leading visual artists, Judy Baca: Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, a Retrospective encompassing nearly two square miles of Baca’s work.
Retrospective
Baca’s Retrospective at 9,880 square feet is the highlight of MOLAA’s grand reopening. The exhibition includes more than 110 works divided across three gallery spaces presenting different aspects of Baca’s artistic production. They include the “Womanist Gallery” [women of color’s term for feminist] focused on Baca’s womanist artworks in a variety of media created throughout her career.
It also includes more personal works, many never seen before. “Public Art Survey” includes painted murals to digital works where visitors will be introduced to the breadth of Baca’s projects through SPARC which Baca founded in 1976. The Great Wall of Los Angeles encompasses Baca’s first masterpiece, as viewers participate in an immersive audiovisual experience of the monumental, half mile long piece that occupies the Tujunga wash in the San Fernando Valley.
In not exactly post-pandemic times, after the plight of essential workers and marginalized populations have been laid bare, Memorias de Nuestra Tierra is emotionally striking. Baca, who led the tour of her retrospective, affirmed this response saying she thought it was just her but “It is emotional, isn’t it? We’re going to have to put little tissue boxes around,” she said.
Witnessing the breadth of Baca’s work across 40 plus years should be taken in incremental steps in order to absorb its depth and beauty. Specifically, with the immersive experience of The Great Wall, one must sit to take it all in.
The experience is one that moves beyond the fourth wall — the space between an audience and subject, bringing viewers into the art and augmenting their reality.
The mural is emotionally provocative in its depiction of California’s history “as seen through the eyes of women and minorities” in numerous connected panels.
Viewers are immersed with animated scenes of California’s prehistory depicting native wildlife and the creation story of the indigenous Chumash.
The projected animation takes the viewer through seminal events of the 20th century, including Chinese labor contributions, the arrival of Jewish refugees (fleeing oppression and the Holocaust) and their contributions to the culture and history of Los Angeles, refugees from the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, the Japanese-American internment of World War II, the Zoot Suit Riots, the Freedom Riders, the disappearance of Rosie the Riveter, gay rights activism, the story of Biddy Mason, deportations of Mexican Americans, the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, and the development of suburbia.
Baca’s composition uses sweeping lines in a sense of movement from the characters and subjects depicted. To visualize the many lives and the stories they told — through intense coloration and uninhibited narratives — engenders awe. Baca’s muralism uplifts the masses, is honest and not only affirms histories of those who have been marginalized but the interconnectedness of our very human nature.
SPARC
Baca founded the first City of Los Angeles Mural Program in 1974, which evolved into the community arts organization, SPARC. Baca specifically involved poor youth of color to create these murals.
The Great Wall of Los Angeles was their first project. The Army Corps of Engineers hired Baca to help improve the area around the Tujunga Wash flood control channel. Baca jumped in, interviewing people about their lives, family histories, ancestry and stories they heard from their older relatives. She also consulted historians. These chronicles became the first time many of the events portrayed in the mural had ever been displayed in public. Despite its length, the mural is not yet complete. Baca will lead the expansion on her masterpiece which is proposed to continue until it reaches about a mile in length, portraying not only contemporary times, but also a vision of the future.
She spoke to RLn about the process in creating the immersive experience of The Great Wall for MOLAA’s reopening.
“This was done by Latin American animation experts,” Baca explained. “The seamless connection between the projectors is magical … There are seven or eight [projectors] and as [the mural is] project[ed] there’s no seams.”
Baca explained the animators recreated an entire sense of the mural, almost at full scale. The projection is 28 minutes in length. Animators took different vignettes of the mural highlighting what Baca and her team had to do to integrate sections within the overall view of the piece. The photographs of the mural came from The Getty, which photographed the most recent restoration in which Baca led a team of 30 painters to renovate the 1976 mural.
“We had … fading and damage over many years,” Baca said. “When it was all up, The Getty came in with a phase one camera and they photographed every inch of the piece so that it could be reproduced at full scale. So if the mural is lost, we could bring it back in full scale print.”
When asked how it felt to have an entire retrospective of her work in LA where she grew up, Baca said it’s overwhelming because she’s still digesting it.
“I really understand that I am a river rock,” Baca said. “All the surges and rages and water running, like the river, I’ve been honed and essentially made smooth, made rounded by all these experiences. And now I’m getting to see it all at once … I’ve never seen it all at once. And now it’s this moving thing from my family’s coming across the border to all that they built and gave. And to this notion of being like a river rock, I watched the LA River turn to concrete. And that influenced me. It influenced The Great Wall production and … working with these children and all that they suffered and went through.”
The retrospective also includes one of her most controversial murals, Baca’s 2005 Danzas Indigenas — public art commissioned by Metro for a station in Baldwin Park. The work was a monument to Toypurina, a Tongva/Kizh medicine woman who opposed colonial rule by Spanish missionaries in California.
The monument has several engraved unattributed statements. The most controversial inscription read: “It was better before they came.” Another inscription was no better received: “This land was Mexican once, was Indian always and is, and will be again.”
SPARC, at the time, reported that, “Save our State with ties to the vigilante Minutemen Border Patrol, erroneously believed that quotes on the monument were racially charged, seditious and anti-American in nature. The residents of Baldwin Park believed otherwise … and quickly mobilized into a group of nearly 1,000 people in a counter protest.”
Indeed, Baca’s rise as an artist came out of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, an anti-war action of the Chicano movement, marking the start of Latino empowerment. Baca cannot be separated from the LA mural movement and its populist underpinnings.
She wanted to make art that was accessible beyond the walls of galleries and museums — for the people she loved.
“People in my family hadn’t ever been to a gallery in their entire lives,” Baca said “My neighbors never went to galleries … And it didn’t make sense to me at the time to put art behind some guarded wall.”
After the first section of the Great Wall was finished, in 1977, Baca travelled to Cuernavaca, Mexico for a residency at El Taller Siqueiros where she studied muralism in the workshop of muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Through artistic work Baca has engaged and helped disenfranchised communities speak out and tell their stories. While working as a teacher at her former high school, Baca attended the Chicano Moratorium. The school principal believed teachers shouldn’t participate in protest marches. Subsequently, Baca and several other teachers were fired.
Soon after, she landed a job at Los Angeles Parks and Recreation Department teaching art as part of a summer program in public parks. Rival gangs hung out in these parks. Baca noticed their graffiti as territorial markings and decided to create a mural in Boyle Heights to bring the community together. Her first team had 20 members from four different gangs. The group called itself Las Vistas Nuevas or New Views. Baca said that she wanted to use public space to create a public voice for, and a public consciousness about people who are, in fact, the majority of the population but who are not represented in any visual way. It also marked the genesis of a collective process to utilize art to mediate between rival gangs competing for public space and identity. In this capacity this group completed three murals in the summer of 1970.
After doing the murals she was offered a job in 1970 as the director of a new citywide mural program. She was in charge of creating this program from the ground up, which included choosing mural locations, designing them and supervising the mural painting teams, comprised of youth who had troubles with the police. Members of the original Las Vistas Nuevas group were hired to help run Baca’s multi-site program. This group painted more than 500 murals.
Baca made great progress building community with gang youth. Still, she struggled with how gendered muraling projects were. Most of the youth she worked with were male because, Baca noted, at that time boys were the only ones parents would allow. Further, Baca found hostility towards the idea of women in these spaces and to feminist ideals in general. Subsequently, for the Great Wall of LA project, Baca strived to connect to other feminist artists and to recruit young women to participate in her mural projects.
In 2019, another Baca mural, Hitting the Wall, created specifically in celebration of the first women’s Olympic marathon during the 1984 LA games, was painted over by a Metro LA graffiti abatement contractor. Baca previously reported in about 2004 Los Angeles Police Department Chief William Bratton created a program to eradicate graffiti. She said Caltrans hired subcontractors to remove graffiti, within 24 hours of vandalization. Baca posited the money would have been better spent had it gone to training youth to become the artists they wanted to become rather than criminalization of graffiti arts. This past June, SPARC’s mural rescue crew power washed the paint covering the mural along the 110 Freeway near 4th Street, in preparation to be unveiled.
Baca reflected on her work in a statement used by MOLAA, saying:
Of greatest interest to me is the invention of systems of ‘voice giving’ for those left without public venues in which to speak. Socially responsible artists from marginalized communities have a particular responsibility to articulate the conditions of their people and to provide catalysts for change, since the perceptions of us as individuals are tied to the conditions of our communities in a racially unsophisticated society. We can not escape that responsibility even when we choose to try; we are made of the ‘blood and dust’ of our ancestors in a continuing history. Being a catalyst for change will change us also.
Judy Baca: Memorias De Nuestra Tierra, A Retrospective
Time: July 14 to Jan. 2022
Cost: The exhibition is included in the museum admission cost of $10 for adults, $7 for students and seniors, free for children under 12 yrs old and MOLAA members and Sundays are free.
Details: www.molaa.org and www.judybaca.com/artist
Venue: Museum of Latin American Art, 628 Alamitos Ave., Long Beach