Judith Francisca Baca (born September 20, 1946) is an American artist, activist, and professor of Chicano studies, world arts, and cultures based at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, California. Baca is the director of the mural project that created the Great Wall of Los Angeles, which was the largest known communal mural project in the world as of 2018.Mercado, Juan Pablo. “Judy Baca, SPARC and a Chicana Mural Movement: Reconstructing U.S. History through Public Art.” Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles., 2018.
Biography
Early life Baca was born in Watts, Los Angeles on September 20, 1946, to Mexican American parents. Her military father never knew of her existence and moved back to the east coast after her birth. In her early life in Watts, she was raised in a predominately Black and Latino area. She lived in an all-female household composed of her mother, her aunts Rita and Delia, and her grandmother Francisca. Her grandmother was an herbal healer and practiced curandera, which profoundly influenced her sense of indigenous Chicano culture.
Baca's mother later married Clarence Ferrari in 1952, and the three of them moved to Pacoima, Los Angeles. Pacoima was drastically different from Watts – Mexican-Americans were minorities in Pacoima. Baca has a half-brother Gary and half-sister Diane.
Education Baca was not allowed to speak Spanish in elementary school, as it was prohibited, but she did not know English very well. Her teacher would tell her to go paint in the corner while the other children studied. After some time, Baca started getting better in classes once she was able to understand the textbooks. With the encouragement of her art teacher, she began drawing and painting. She later graduated from Bishop Alemany High School in 1964.
She then attended California State University, Northridge (CSUN) and earned her bachelor's degree in 1969 and a master's degree in fine art in 1979. Judy was the first Baca to attend college, and actually quit for a brief period of time after becoming tired of being poor. She sought out a job in production illustration and worked there until she was inspired to go back to college and get a Bachelors of Fine Art. While there, she learned and studied modern abstract art. She wanted to make art that was accessible beyond the constraints of the gallery and the museum. She wanted to make art for the people she loved, but she knew that 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 to 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." After completing graduate school, Baca continued her education, studying muralism at La Tallera in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Works of art
Las Vistas Nuevas In the summer of 1970, Baca decided to create a mural in Boyle Heights in order to bring community together. 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.
Raspados Mojados In Raspados Mojados Baca used a street vendor cart as a sculptural installation to address immigration issues and the misrepresentations of Mexicans living in the United States. Los Angeles street vendors constantly sell ice cream as well as Mexican snacks, fruit cocktails, corn on the cob, and raspados. This has brought attention to Los Angeles and has attempted to pass pushcarts loitering laws into any city. At the front of the cart a painting of a Mexican man captioned “illegal alien, undocumented worker” which is the main focus of the painting presented on the cart. On one side of the cart there is a painting of a man who is being dragged across a fence representing the Mexican/us border to the U.S. It is labeled Bracero Wars or also known as the Mexican Farm Labor Program. Bracero is a Spanish term meaning "manual laborer" or "one who works using his arms.”
The Bracero Program started on August 4, 1942, when many growers feared that World War II would bring labor shortages to low-paying agricultural jobs. That is when the idea of bringing Mexicans legally to help with those shortages. Mexicans signed contracts to come to the U.S. legally only to work farm jobs where needed. They were given free housing, meals at reasonable prices, insurance provided by the employer's expense, and free transportation back to Mexico at the end of their contract. They were only allowed to hire immigrants where shortages were existing but rules were not followed. Growers benefited from hungry working Mexicans from their cheap labor.
Next to that painting, there is one with Mexicans at their farm jobs, with painting or tattoos on their back, as well as one with the LA skyscrapers while women sweep and work. The tattoos show their heritage and backgrounds as well as how they have been mistreated by the U.S. and what it was like crossing with many other Mexican immigrants to help support their families.
Las Tres Marías In 1976 Baca created an installation piece of an upholstered triptych that displays two identities of femininity in Chicana culture: La Pachuca and La Chola. These archetypes are on opposite sides, separated by a mirror in the center. Baca created this art installation as a way to bring attention to the different forms of identity expressed when one looks in the mirror.
Having drawn inspiration from the culture that Baca was born and raised in she implemented this identity of La Pachuca. An identity that is a part of the Pachuco identity and subculture that is known for challenging the societal norms within the U.S. It is also an identity that Baca herself has performed in other artworks, such as her photographed performance where Baca dressed up as a Pachuca with several photographs taken of her by Donna Deitch, and a print titled Absolutely Chicana (2009). The Chola is an identity within the Chicana culture that derives from the Pachuca identity, one that Baca implemented in her art work with the help of a member from the Tiny Locas gang known as Flaquita that can be seen as the chola on the far left panel.
The triptych itself serves as a form of symbolism and homage to the Christian religious art in the triptych format and in title since Las Tres Marías translates to the three Marys. Rather than using the image of the Virgin Mary, Baca used these illustrated panels "as a commentary on the limited range of Mexican American female types in both eras."
Mi Abuelita Their first project was on three walls of an outdoor stage in Hollenbeck Park. Mi Abuelita ("My Grandmother") was a mural that 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."
Local police did not like the idea of rival gang members working together, fearing it would spark gang violence. Baca also began to work on the mural without permission from the city or the manager of Hollenbeck Park, which engendered questions from her supervisor and other city officials.
Despite all these troubles, 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 done and 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."
After its completion, the community loved Mi Abuelita. 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.
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 this program from the ground up, which included choosing where murals would go, designing the murals, and supervising the mural painting teams, which would consist of teenagers who were in trouble with the police. Members of the original Las Vistas Nuevas group were hired to help run Baca's multi-site program. This group would go on to paint more than 500 murals.
In this new job she encountered her first problems with censorship. People in neighborhoods where murals were being created wanted to show all parts of life in their neighborhood, both the good and bad. The city, however, did not want any controversial subjects depicted in these murals. In one case, when the city objected to a mural that showed people struggling with police, 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.
Baca's efforts to include community in her artistic processes make her different to her time. Bringing youth together to create art left a lasting impression in Los Angeles, shifting Chicano/a culture. The involvement of poor youth of color in Baca's artistic processes changed the way white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal culture perceived their place in society. Perhaps even more importantly, Baca's Citywide Mural Program strengthened community and gave people a sense of purpose.
The World Wall and other projects 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 artists from all over the world to help her paint it. She wanted it to be painted in panels so it could be moved around to different places. After years of planning and contributions made by artists from other countries, the painting had its debut in Finland in 1990. The idea was that when the panels traveled around the world each host country would add their own panel to the collection. Some of the countries included Russia, Israel/Palestine, Mexico, and Canada.