"I don’t set myself up like the white-boy artists historically did in the United States, where they didn’t feel any sense of responsibility to the community. I don’t set myself up as the sole master of the work of art.”
In which an artist discusses making a particular work
Artist Judy Baca created the mural The Great Wall of Los Angeles over five summers (between 1974 and 1983) with four hundred collaborators from the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), an organization she cofounded that is made up of youth, artists, and community members. Running along the walls of the Tujunga Wash, a tributary of the Los Angeles River in North Hollywood, the mural is half a mile long and features the erased history of local communities. With a grant from the Mellon Foundation, Baca and SPARC are now expanding The Great Wall’s chronology. These “sites of public memory,” as they are described by Baca, are visual records of our authentic historical narrative. The new sections are being painted indoors, as opposed to on site, thanks to innovative mural processes and technologies. Baca and I discussed Generation on Fire, a new segment of the wall that focuses on the ’60s.
—Trina Calderón
THE BELIEVER: Tell me about the origins of muralism in Los Angeles and how you came to work as a muralist.
JUDY BACA: I’ve been involved in the mural movement since its beginning in Los Angeles, as the director of the first citywide mural program. The precedents for this work in the twentieth century are Los Tres Grandes [leading Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco] and, of course, the Works Progress Administration. The WPA mural programs came to be, in part, because of George Biddle writing to Roosevelt saying: Look what the Mexicans are doing down here in terms of creating a giant public education program and painting on public buildings.
On the Mexican side, Los Tres Grandes were supported largely by their government’s mural program, which was directed by the secretary of public education, José Vasconcelos. He created a program that gave them sites to paint public pieces on. Their intention was to educate the public about the precepts of the revolution, which was about land, family, and liberty. While the revolution in some ways failed, the artwork was a way of carrying those concepts forward. Here in the United States, the WPA was, unfortunately, kind of shortsighted. It was a wonderful program, but it didn’t continue long enough. It wasn’t until 1974 that the city of Los Angeles began a mural program, which was when I proposed it to the city council. We began a public program that contracted artists to do works in their communities with the support of community members.
The Great Wall was a result of that program. It had been on a production hiatus because we didn’t have the public monies to continue it after the ’80s. The last time it had been worked on was in ’83.
BLVR: How did you begin to imagine this new segment of the mural, Generation on Fire?
JB: The process is always kind of procedural, and it’s something that we have used since the beginning of The Great Wall. Researchers, historians, thought leaders, and people from the community help determine the content. This particular section came out of an interview I did with Tom Hayden. I asked Tom to give us a general view of how he would describe the 1960s, considering his significant acts during that period, both as a member of the Chicago 10 and later as an elected official. He said very definitively, “We were a generation on fire.” What he meant was that there were thousands and thousands of self-described revolutionaries, and the tone of the era was people thinking they could create change. It was more acceptable, or more the norm, to consider yourself an activist—compared with today, when it’s common for young people coming out of universities to be focused more on entertainment and social media, and basically nonaction. People in that time came together across race and class and began to take action to end the war. To change what was the white male world. That’s how Tom described it, and that’s what the image is about. On one side, there are people carrying the I AM A MAN signs from the marches in Selma, Alabama, and underneath them are the actual Jim Crow laws. Reverend [James] Lawson told us the most important thing about the ’60s was the end of Jim Crow—even though we also know that Jim Crow shifted to the prisons. When we picture the Jim Crow laws, everybody thinks they came primarily from the South, but California had extreme Jim Crow laws too. California’s laws were aimed primarily at Asians, Latinos, and Mexicans. So when young people march alongside the mural, they’ll be learning the history as they go along, and the reality of these Jim Crow laws will come into view.
And then, on the other side of this discrimination, you see the “generation on fire,” with their arms linked, with fire in their chests. Above them is the Freedom Rider bus. We have named the people who took the Freedom Rides—some of them ended up at the lunch counters here in Los Angeles.
BLVR: Yes, you can see their names right outside the bus windows. After you’ve conceptualized this image, what’s the next phase of your process?
JB: No painting—no mural—I have ever done is painted directly on the wall without a drawing. After our research has established a defining metaphor, we go to the design team. The design team are artists I work with who propose images or sketches. We look at all these ideas and select an option we like. From there, the image comes into my digital mural lab, and I begin to manipulate the ideas into what we call the Punto de Oro system, which is based on the Mexican division of space and musical ratios. No arm flies in any direction and no head turns without being coordinated by this ratio, which creates a sense of musical time within the piece. Then those final drawings are solidified and I make sure they fit with the other pieces of the mural, so it all flows. From there, the drawings go into colorations. The drawings are printed on giant nonwoven fabric material. The prints are in blue. We do a monochromatic treatment of the pieces—meaning we’re creating three-dimensionality with one color, a phthalo blue. From there we begin to color-mix based on the colorations. We’re looking at a color treatment that is predetermined. And then we begin to paint. It’s a far cry from a spray-can artwork.