Born: 20 September 1946, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is republished from the National Park Service. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Judith Baca (b. 1946) identifies as a Chicana lesbian feminist artist. She works in a figurative style of muralism that recalls the political golden age of the 1930s in the United States and Mexico. She is best known for the 1976 public art mural The History of California, popularly known as The Great Wall of Los Angeles in Los Angeles. The large (13 feet x 2,754 feet) mural covers six city blocks, and is one of the largest in the world. It is located on Coldwater Canyon Avenue between Oxnard Street and Burbank Boulevard at the eastern edge of the Los Angeles Valley College campus in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles. It is used in the curriculum of the college and other local schools. The Army Corps of Engineers commissioned the mural from Baca as a beautification project and painting began in 1978. It was completed in 1984 with the help of over four hundred volunteers, many of whom came from impoverished or disenfranchised backgrounds and were coordinated by the community center Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, which Baca founded in 1976.
The mural is significant because it tells the history of California from the perspective of women and minorities. The social realist style harkens back to the US government-funded Works Progress Administration murals of the 1930s as well as to the visual traditions of Mexican muralism by artists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros. Social justice movements that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, including labor rights, feminism, gay liberation, and indigenous rights were important influences on The Great Wall of Los Angeles. The mural is significant because it includes the history of LGBTQ identified people as well as Native Americans in California. Its chronological scope moves from the time of dinosaurs through the 1950s, and there are current plans to update it through the present-day and to make it more accessible with the addition of a bike path and restoration.