Judy Baca

From The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1976-84

It’s over 90 on a summer day in LA. Below street level, in a concrete flood control channel in the Valley, eighty at-risk kids of different ethnicities struggle with the unfamiliar tools of the mural trade—lots of paint gets splashed around—but under the direction of Judy Baca and a team of artists, in that summer of 1976 they completed 1,000 feet of the most remarkable mural in a city famous for them: The Great Wall of Los Angeles.

The Great Wall is unique. It’s both history painting and landscape—that is, a history of California inscribed ON the landscape. Located in the Tujunga Wash, a concrete channel created by the Army Corps of Engineers to tame the flood-prone Los Angeles River, The Great Wall presents a new version of state history, including women and the many minorities who lived, worked, and flourished here. Originally intended to present California history to 1910, the project kept going, adding about 350 feet of mural each year until 1984. The largest known communal mural project in the world, The Great Wall was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2017.

Judy Baca was born in Watts in 1946 and raised in an all-female household. Baca graduated from Cal State Northridge with a BA and an MA in fine arts before studying muralism at La Tallera, once David Alfaro Siquieros’ workshop, in Cuernavaca. Her many mural projects honor, and expand, the social commitment of the Mexican muralists. In 1970—she was 24—she was hired to direct a city-wide mural program; she immediately enlisted local youth as workers and solicited input from the community. In 1976 she founded the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), a non-profit community arts center in Santa Monica, to continue funding murals. 

Could Baca have imagined that The Great Wall would still be in progress after 50 years? In the SPARC studio, a 10-foot-tall, 22-foot-wide painting titled The 1968 East L.A. Walkouts is underway, soon to be erected on the opposite side of the river, bringing The Great Wall into the present. To be completed in time for the 2028 LA Olympics, the new section will not shy away from controversial moments--the occupation of Alcatraz by Native American activists from 1968 to 1971, the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973, and the pandemic of 2020.

At once a way to beautify the city and to bring its many peoples together, Baca has called The Great Wall “a tattoo on the scar where the river once ran.” Between the muralists and the ecologists working to bring the river back, the scar is healing.