| Judy Baca | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Judith Francisca Baca |
| Born | September 20, 1946 Los Angeles, California |
| Nationality | American |
| Field | Murals |
| Training | California State University, Northridge |
| Movement | Chicano Moratorium Chicano Movement |
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),[1] 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.[2]
Baca was born in Huntington Park on September 20, 1946 to Mexican American parents, her father Valentino Marcel, a musician, whom she never met, and her mother Ortencia, who worked at a tire factory.[3] She was raised in Watts, Los Angeles (a predominately Mexican-American neighborhood), in an all-female home, with her mother, aunts Rita and Delia, and her grandmother Francisca.[4] Her grandmother was a herbal healer and practiced curanderismo,[4] which profoundly influenced her sense of indigenous Chicano culture.
In 1952, her mother remarried Clarence Ferrari. After, the three of them moved to Pacoima, Los Angeles. This neighborhood was drastically different then Watts, as the Mexican-Americans were minorities and Ferrari, of Italian descent, did not want Spanish to be spoken in the house.[4]
As well as at home, she was not allowed to speak Spanish in school, and she did not know English very well. It did take some time, and she started to become better in classes once she was able to understand the textbooks. With the encouragement of her art teacher, she began drawing and painting. She would graduate from Bishop Alemany High School in 1964.[4]
She then attended California State University, Northridge (CSUN) and earned her Bachelor's degree in 1969 and Master's degree in art in 1979. While there, she learned and studied modern abstract art. She wanted to make art for her family and the people in Watts, but she knew they didn't go to galleries. "I thought to myself, if I get my work into galleries, who will go there? People in my family hadn't ever been in a gallery in their entire lives. My neighbors never went to galleries...And it didn't make sense to me at the time to put art behind some guarded wall."[5]
When she graduated from CSUN, she got a job teaching at her former high school. Her students were not very friendly with each other, and she thought she had an idea as to teach them how to cooperate with each other. She had a group of her students make a mural on one side of the school's wall. Everybody wanted to work on it, and it forced them to work things out without fighting. Baca was present at the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, an anti-war action of the Chicano Movement. The principal of the school believed teachers should not take part in the protest marches, and she was fired with several other teachers.[6]
After being fired, she thought she could never get another job because of her involvement in the protests. She would find her next job at the Los Angeles Parks and Recreation Department. Her new job consisted of her teaching art for a summer program in the city's public park. In Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, at this time, had the most Mexican-Americans and had the highest number of gangs in the country. Members of different gangs loitered in the parks she worked at, and she noticed the graffiti and she knew it was territorial markings. "You could read a wall and learn everything you needed to know about that community." One of her favorites was, "I'd rather spend one day as a lion than a hundred as a lamb."[7]
In the summer of 1970, Baca wanted to find a way to have art bridge the neighborhood. She decided to create a mural in Boyle Heights as a way for people to positively feel the neighborhood was theirs. In the first team, she had twenty members from four different gangs, and the group decided on the name Las Vistas Nuevas ("New Views"). The mural they would create would show images that would be familiar to the Mexican-Americans who were living in the neighborhood. "I want 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.[8]
Their first project was on three walls of an outdoor stage in Hollenbeck Park. Mi Abuelita ("My Grandmother"), the mural depicted a Mexican-American grandmother with her arms outstretched as if to give a hug. "This work recognized the primary position of the matriarch in Mexican families. It also marked the first step in the development of a unique collective process that employs art to mediate between rival gang members competing for public space and public identity." [9]
This project was difficult because she had to get the different members to cooperate with each other. Every day, problems arose with gang members who were not on the mural team and they didn't like what Baca was doing. They would attempt to interfere with the project, by threatening team members and vandalizing the work site. Local police did not like the idea of rival gang members together, fearing it would spark gang violence. She also began to work on the mural without permission from the city or the manager of Hollenbeck Park, which arouse questions from her supervisor and other city officials.[10]
Despite all of the trouble, Baca wanted to finish the project. She had lookouts who would signal the mural team if rival gang members were headed toward the work site or if the police were coming. One day, a city official came to the park because he had been getting complaints about the project. After seeing the progress being done and the team members working so well with each other, he gave Baca permission from the city to complete the mural. "The city was amazed at the work I was doing, making murals with kids who scared directors out of neighborhood centers."[11]
After its completion, the community loved it. Baca said, "Everybody related to it. People brought candles to that site. For 12 years people put flowers at the base of the grandmother image." Las Vistas Nuevas would complete a total of three murals that summer.[11]
After the murals, she was offered a job in 1970 as the director of a new citywide mural program. She was in charge of creating the program from ground up, including choosing where murals go, designing the murals, and supervising the mural painting teams. They would consist of teenagers who were in trouble with the police. Members of the original Las Vistas Nuevas were hired to help run the multi-site program. This group would go on to paint more than 500 murals.[11]
With this new job, she encountered her first problems with censorship. People in the neighborhoods of the murals wanted to show all parts of life of the neighborhood, the good and bad. The city, however, did not want any controversy shown on the murals. One example was when the city objected to a mural that showed people struggling with police, and they threatened to stop funding the program if Baca did not remove it. Baca said, "I really liked the idea that the work could not be owned by anyone. So, therefore it wasn't going to be interesting to the rich or to the wealthy, and it didn't have to meet the caveats of art that museums would be interested in. Rather than give in , she formed the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in 1976 to continue funding the creation of murals in public.[12]
Their first project was the Great Wall of Los Angeles. She was hired by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to help improve the area around a San Fernando Valley flood control channel called the Tujunga Wash. It's essentially a ditch that contained a large concrete retaining wall. Her idea for a mural was to paint a history of the city of Los Angeles, but not the version found in history books. The events that were overlooked were the ones that interested her. "It was an excellent place to bring youth of varied ethnic backgrounds from all over the city to work on an alternate view of the history of the U.S. which included people of color who had been left out of American history books." Baca also said the defining metaphor of the mural would be "It is a tattoo on the scar where the river once ran."[13]
Baca was inspired by Los tres Grandes ("The Three Greats"), a novel about the three of the most influential Mexican muralists: Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. In 1977, she attended a workshop at the Taller Siqueiros in Cuernavaca, Mexico, to learn muralism techniques and see their murals in person. Even though all three were deceased at the time, she was able to work with some of Siqueiros' former students. She also interviewed people about their lives, family histories, ancestry, and stories they remember hearing from their older relatives, as well as consulting history experts. From this, she was able to create the design for the mural. Some of the things portrayed in the mural was the first time they were blazoned in public, including but not limited to the Dust Bowl Journey, Japanese American internment during World War II, Zoot Suit Riots, and the Freedom Bus Rides.[14]
Baca wanted the project to be done by people as diverse as the ones that were to be painted. She had people from all different ages and backgrounds participate. Some were scholars and artists, but the majority were just community members. "Making a mural is like a big movie production, it can involve 20 sets of scaffolding, four trucks, and food for 50 people." 400 people came out and help paint the mural, which took seven summers to complete, and was finished in 1984.[15]
Baca began a professorship at University of California, Irvine in 1980, and left in 1994.[16] The next year, she implemented the Muralist Training Workshop to teach people the techniques she had picked up.[15] She also was a professor at California State University, Monterey Bay from 1994 to 1996, where she co-founded the Visual & Public Arts Institute Department.
In 1996, she moved to University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and took on multiple roles. In 1993, she co-founded UCLA's Cesar Chavez Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, an institution for which she serves as vice chair.
In 1998, she served as a master artist in residence with the Role of the Arts in Civic Dialogue at Harvard University [17]
In 1987, she began painting The World Wall: A Vision of the Future Without Fear, a painting that showed the world with no-violence. She believed the first step to world peace was imagining it, and she wanted artist from all over the world to help her paint it. She wanted it to be painted in panels so it could moved around to different places. After years of planning and contributions from artists from other countries, it had its debut in Finland in 1990. The idea was when the panels traveled the world, the host country would add their own panel to the collection. Some of the countries include Russia, Israel/Palestine, Mexico, and Canada.[18]
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 1,800 at-risk youth and is responsible for over 105 murals throughout the city.
In 1996, she created La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra ("Our Land Has Memory") for the Denver International Airport. This one was personal for Baca, as her grandparents fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution and came to La Junta, Colorado, Colorado.[17] The mural "not only to tell the forgotten stories of people who, like birds or water, traveled back and forth across the land freely, before there was a line that distinguished which side you were from, but to speak to our shared human condition as temporary residents of the earth...The making of this work was an excavation of a remembering of their histories." It was completed in 2000.[19]
She conducted research by interviewing residents and lead a workshop with University of Southern Colorado students. She found a picture in a garage in Pueblo by Juan Espinosa, photographer and founder El Diario de la Gente, Boulder, Colorado, of an important meeting between Corky Gonzales of the Colorado Crusade for Justice and Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers, and their agreement to bring the Delano grape strike to Colorado.[17]
In June 2008, Judy spoke at the "Against the Wall: The ruin and renewal of LA's murals" panel held at Morono Kiang Gallery across the street from the famous "Pope of Broadway" mural. In that same year, she made the Cesar Chavez Monument Arch of Dignity, Equality, and Justice. It is located at San Jose State University. It has a portrait of Cesar Chavez, Mahatma Gandhi, and Dolores Huerta.[20]
20 ft x 35 ft. Acyrlic on cement. Painted in the band shell of Hollenbeck Park, sponsored by the Los Angeles Parks and Recreation Department (her employer at the time). The mural depicts an Abuelita ("Grandmother") with outstretched arms, like she is ready for a hug.[9]
20 ft x 30 ft. Acrylic on cement. Painted on a vaulted ceiling entrance located at the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles. Sponsored by the First Unitarian Church. The mural features portrait likenesses of woman's rights activist and founder of the church, Caroline Severance, Unitarian Martyr Miguel Servetus, and others.
13 ft x 2400 ft. The Great Wall of Los Angeles is thought to be the largest mural in the world. The mural depicts California's history, with some controversial subjects painted for the first time in public.
The World Wall has been exhibited in Finland, Russia, Mexico, and throughout the United States of America. It consists of eight panels done by Judy Baca and various international artists.
I wanted to put memory into a piece of the land once owned by the American Indian cultures—memory and willpower are what any culture, the ones living then and those living now, has to have to preserve itself.[21]
Baca's work "Danzas Indigenas" at the Metrolink station in Baldwin Park, California contains a quote from the Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldua reads: "This land was Mexican once, was Indian always and is, and will be again," and "It was better before they came." About the first quote, Joseph Turner of Save Our State stated, "It's seditious. It essentially talks about returning this land to Mexico." About the second quote SOS claims the referent of "they" is "white people"[22] On May 14, 2005, approximately 25 members of Save Our State demonstrated, with 300 counter-demonstrators.[23]
31 ft x 29 ft digital mural on vinyl. By monumentalizing the hidden, or often forgotten, workforce of Los Angeles, Baca successfully creates a mural that forces the public to recognize the unrecognizable.
10 ft x 55 ft digitally generated and hand painted mural on aluminum substrate. Located in Denver International Airport's central terminal. Sponsored by Denver International Airport Public Art Program.
20 ft x 30 ft Digitally Produced Mural. Baca worked with Southern Ute and Chicano Youth of Durango Colorado to create this mural. It was produced in SPARC's Digital Mural Lab.
Designed and created memorial podiums on the history of the region's murals. Furthermore, Baca designed fence treatments along the Venice Boardwalk, which incorporated the 15 tile murals. It was commissioned by the city of Los Angeles and the Venice Beach Ocean Front Walk Renovation Project.
14ft x 32ft digital mural at the Central American Research and Education Center of Los Angeles in Pico Union. Developed with youth participants and Central American scholars on the migration of the 1980’s of Central Americans to Los Angeles. Sponsored by City of Los Angeles and SPARC.
25 ft arch, called the Cesar Chavez Monument Arch of Dignity, Equality, and Justice. Located on the San Jose State University campus and has murals of farm workers, Cesar Chavez, Mahatma Gandhi, and Delores Huerta. [24]
Baca's mother remarried after her father, and Baca has a half-brother Gary (1952-) and half-sister Diane (1957-).[25] She was 19 years old when she got married in college, but it ended six years later. She lives in Venice, California.[26]
Baca's grandfather, Teodoro Baca, escaped troops that wanted to enlist him in Pancho Villa's army. He owned a store and land in Parral, Chihuahua. A simultaneous robbery of Baca's grandmother at the store and Teodoro on a train convinced the couple that they should go North. Seferino Baca and Teodoro settled at the base of the Purgatoire River.[17]