Skirball Cultural Center

“I want to use public space to create a public voice, and a public consciousness about the presence of people who are, in fact, the majority of the population but who are not represented in any visual way. By telling their stories we are giving voice to the voiceless and visualizing the whole of the American story.” —Judy Baca

In 1974, Baca conceived of the Great Wall as a monument to the people of California, featuring a visual history of ethnic peoples from prehistoric times to the 1950s. Soon after, Baca co-founded the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) and became its artistic director. The Great Wall was SPARC’s first public art project which was completed over five summers and employed 400 young people and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds working with artists, oral historians, ethnologists, scholars, and hundreds of community members to paint the mural on the walls of the LA River.

Today with a group of researchers, digital assistant illustrators, muralists, and junior muralists in training and sponsored by SPARC, Baca’s Great Wall team have developed a mural scrolling system where over 400 feet of artwork can be painted, moved, and viewed by the public within a single room. Through this groundbreaking method, new mural sections of the Great Wall are being painted indoors and traveling to institutions, galleries, and community spaces. 

This exhibition features recently completed mural sections focused on the 1960s that will soon be added to the existing mural, as well as drawing studies and an immersive video installation. As the new mural sections demonstrate, this decade was shaped by the moral courage, peaceful protests, and cultural awakening of the Civil Rights Movement (1954–1968). Activist Tom Hayden referred to the young people involved—self-described revolutionaries linking arms across faith, race, and identity—as “a generation on fire.” 
 
These are not distant stories or people but instead a living history and community in which we all take part. The Great Wall of Los Angeles brings the past to the present and seeks to inspire the next generation. What can we learn from this “generation on fire” as we try to build a more just society?

This exhibition is organized by the Skirball Cultural Center and curated by Vicki Phung Smith.

For over forty years, Dr. Judith F. Baca has been innovating the practice of working with local communities to create social justice oriented, large-scale vibrant works of art. She founded the first City of Los Angeles Mural Program in 1974, which evolved into a community arts organization known as the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). Today, while continuing to serve SPARC as artistic director, Baca is one of the most celebrated Chicana artists, a world-renowned muralist, social activist, and UCLA Professor Emeritus. In March 2023, Baca was awarded the National Medal of Art Recognition by the President of the United States, Joseph Biden.

Since its founding in 1976 by muralist Judy Baca, filmmaker Donna Deitch, and artist Christina Schlesinger, SPARC has led with the idea that the arts could engage with important issues of the time and that everyone could participate. SPARC has focused on creating public art that amplifies the stories of marginalized Los Angeles communities, promote social change, and provide a new vision of what art could do.