(WestHollywoodToday.blogspot, Los Angeles, CA—October 26, 2023)
Photos by Karen Ostlund
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Painting in the River of Angels: Judy Baca and The Great Wall, the artist’s first solo exhibition at the museum, until June 2 2024.
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JUDY BACA (2nd from right) with her LACMA team.
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Painting in the River of Angels is co-curated by Dhyandra Lawson, Andy Song Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, and Deliasofia Zacarias, Executive Assistant and Fellow, Director’s Office, LACMA.
The Los Angeles artist Judy Baca (born 1946) conceived The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1975) as a monument to the people of California. Over five summers (1976-83), Baca collaborated with 400 youth, artists, and community members on a mural that told the erased histories of local communities.
The artist, alongside members of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), an organization Baca co-founded, designed the mural and painted it on the walls of the Tujunga Wash, a tributary of the L.A. River in North Hollywood, California.
In 2021, SPARC received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to expand the landmark’s chronology into the 21st century.
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The Great Wall of Fire, Generation of Fire.
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At LACMA, Baca and SPARC artists will paint new sections of The Great Wall during the museum’s public hours. These new paintings span the 1960s with the first panel depicting moments of the Chicano Movement including the Farmworkers’ Movement and the East L.A. Student Walkouts, and the second panel featuring vignettes of the Watts Rebellion, Watts Renaissance, and community organizing by the Black Panthers.
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| Great Wall of LA Farmworkers Movement East LA. |
After the artists complete the paintings at LACMA, these panels will be added to The Great Wall, as part of the expansion that creates a mile of visual history.
LACMA’s exhibition will also debut Generation on Fire, a new section of the wall memorializing activists known as the Freedom Riders. In 1961, they boarded buses traveling from Washington, D.C. to Southern states to challenge segregation on public transit. Baca centers the activists forming a circle in solidarity.
It features materials from the artist’s archive that have never been exhibited, revealing Baca’s process and innovations to muralist. The exhibition includes Baca’s Augmented Reality Lens, The River Once Ran (2022), part of Collection II of LACMA × Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives.
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The Great Walls of LA, Division of the Barrios and Chavez Ravine.
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Fifty years ago, Judy Baca began painting in the L.A. River to share communities' unreported perspectives, effectively shouting from the gutter of history,” said Dhyandra Lawson. “Her impact in L.A. and on the history of art and muralism are immeasurable".
"We are honored to work with Judy and SPARC artists on this unprecedented project, illuminating her vision for a people’s monument she now expands into the present.”
Deliasofia Zacarias added, “Baca is revered for many career-long achievements that have expanded public access to art and art education. At LACMA, she continues this commitment by allowing museum audiences to witness her work in real time, thereby challenging traditional distinctions between public and private space, as well as public and private practice.”
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Judy Baca at LACMA.
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LACMA’s galleries will transform into an active art studio, where audiences will be able to witness Judy Baca and her team paint new murals of The Great Wall of Los Angeles before they are permanently installed on the banks of the L.A. River,” said Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. “Baca’s work re-examines history, monumental painting, and representation of Los Angeles and its communities.
Painting in the River of Angels is a testament to artistic legacy and the power of visual storytelling in amplifying diverse voices.
Judy Baca has created public art for four decades.
In 1974, Baca founded the City of Los Angeles’s first mural program, which produced over 400 murals, employed thousands of local participants, and evolved into an arts organization—the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC).
She continues to serve as SPARC’s artistic director while promoting social justice and participatory public art projects.
Her best-known work is The Great Wall of Los Angeles, located in the San Fernando Valley. The mural spans half a mile and is still a work in progress that is engaging another generation of youth.
The mural-making process has exemplified community involvement, employing more than 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds, artists, oral historians, and scholars.
In 2017 The Great Wall of Los Angeles received national recognition on the National Registry of Historic Places in the U.S.
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| Watts Rebellion, Watts Renaissance, and community organizing by the Black Panthers. |
Baca is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship, and the Mellon Foundation Grant for the expansion of The Great Wall.
Most recently, she was honored with the 2021 National Medal of Arts. Baca makes art shaped by an interactive relationship of history, people, and place. Her public artworks focus on revealing and reconciling peoples’ struggles for their rights and affirming the community’s connections to place.
On November 4, 2023, Baca was honored alongside filmmaker David Fincher at the 2023 Art+Film Gala, presented by Gucci at the LACMA Museum.
LACMA.org FACTS ABOUT THE GREAT WALL OF LOS ANGELES:The Great Wall of Los Angeles, also known as "The History of California" is a half-mile long mural telling the history of California through images of significant figures and historic events from diverse and traditionally marginalized communities.
The mural is painted on the west wall of the Tujunga Flood Control Channel in the North Hollywood area of the City of Los Angeles, California, and was completed between 1974 and 1984 by teams of young people and artist supervisors.
Chicana muralist Judith F. Baca, working with the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), was primarily responsible for the artistic vision and subject matter depicted in the mural. The flood control channel was built by the Army Corps of Engineers, and is owned and maintained by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works.
The Great Wall of Los Angeles is one of the largest murals in the world, 13.5 feet high and 2,754 feet long, stretching over half a mile and is located in a section of the Tujunga Flood Control Channel bounded by Oxnard Street to the north, Coldwater Canyon Boulevard to the east, Burbank Boulevard to the south, and the Coldwater Canyon Extension road (sometimes called Lancer Lane) and a parking lot to the west. The mural is arranged in connected chronological segments depicting eras of California’s history from prehistoric times through the 1960s.
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