Judy Baca

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Judith Francisca Baca (born September 20, 1946) is an American artist, activist, and University of California, Los Angeles professor of fine arts. She is the founder and executive director of the Venice, California-based Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), a community arts center, and is best known as the director of the mural project that created one of the largest murals in the world, the Great Wall of Los Angeles.

Baca was born in East Los Angeles, California to Mexican American parents. She was raised in an all-female home. Her grandmother was an herbal healer, which profoundly influenced her sense of indigenous Chicano culture. Baca was present at the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, an anti-war action of the Chicano Movement. She earned Bachelor's and Master's degrees in art from California State University, Northridge (CSUN). In 1974, she founded Los Angeles' first mural program, which produced over 400 murals. In 1976, she founded SPARC. In 1977, she attended a workshop at the Taller Siqueiros in Cuernavaca, Mexico, to learn muralism techniques. Baca began a professorship at University of California, Irvine in 1980. In 1988, Mayor of Los Angeles Tom Bradley commissioned her to create the Neighborhood Pride Program, a citywide project to paint murals. The project employed over 1,000 at-risk youth and is responsible for over 80 murals throughout the city. In 1993, she co-founded UCLA's Cesar Chavez Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, an institution for which she serves as vice chair. In 1998, Baca organized a traveling mural dedicated to world peace called The World Wall: A Vision of the Future without Fear.

[edit] Important works

La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra, a mural for Denver International Airport
La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra: California, a mural at the University of Southern California
The Great Wall of Los Angeles, a Los Angeles landmark
A memorial for Cesar Chavez in San Jose
A monument for Martin Luther King, Jr. in San Diego
Danzas Indígenas, a monument in Baldwin Park, California that was protested by Save Our State, an anti-illegal immigration group
The World Wall: A Vision of the Future without Fear, a travelling mural.

[edit] References

Fernandez, Mayra. Judy Baca, artist. Cleveland: Modern Curriculum Press, 1994. ISBN 0-8136-5276-6.
Hammond, Harmony. Lesbian art in America: a contemporary history. New York: Rizzoli, 2000. ISBN 0-8478-2248-6.
Olmstead, Mary. Judy Baca. Chicago: Raintree, 2005. ISBN 1-4109-0915-8.
Telgen, Diane, and Jim Kamp, editors. Latinas! : women of achievement. Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1996. ISBN 0-7876-0883-1.
Las Mujeres: Mexican American/Chicana women: photographs and biographies of seventeen women from the Spanish colonial period to the present. Windsor: National Women’s History Project, 1995. ISBN 0-938625-34-9.