#judith baca

[jareckiworld]

Judith Francisca Baca — The Birth of the Vision of the Heart (triptych; acrylic on wood panels, 1981)

[infinitamente-azul]

Mur Murs (1981) dir. Agnès Varda

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Judy Baca, b. 1946 Tres Generaciones / Three Generations US (1973) [Source]

It’s a work that portrays herself, her mother and her grandmother!

Wikipedia says:

Judith Francisca Baca is an American Chicana artist, activist, and University of California, Los Angeles professor of Chicana/o Studies in the School of Social Sciences and a professor of World Arts and Cultures in the School of Art and Architecture. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the Venice, California-based Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), a community arts center, and is best known as the director of the mural project that created one of the largest murals in the world, the Great Wall of Los Angeles.

[brooklynmuseum]

In 1980, artist Ana Mendieta curated Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States at New York's A.I.R. Gallery. Featuring eight women artists of the Third World—Judith Baca, Beverly Buchanan, Janet Henry, Senga Nengudi, Lydia Okumura, Howardena Pindell, Selena Whitefeather, and Zarina—the exhibition was conceived as a conversation between the artists and the primarily white, middle-class female members of the gallery. As a space for truth-seeking through critical dialogue, the show stressed the need to confront the dominant culture with the existence and value of nonwhite experience, in and out of the art world. 

A.I.R. Gallery, the first all-women artists’ cooperative gallery in the United States, was founded in 1972 by second-wave feminist artists who, like other groups including “Where We At” Black Women Artists, believed that female-only spaces were necessary to build a culture of support. While the core membership of A.I.R. lacked racial and economic diversity, limiting their ability to be truly representative, the Cuban American Mendieta became an active member in 1979. She withdrew in 1982, however, concluding that the mainstream Feminist Movement had again “failed to remember” its nonwhite counterparts and their struggle with issues of race, gender, and class.

Installation view of Ana Mendieta (American, born Cuba, 1948–1985) Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations), 1972. Chromogenic prints. Courtesy of the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC and Galerie Lelong, New York.

[dyke-bars-never-last]

Judith F. Baca

(September 20, 1946 - )

Her process as Muralist begins with meetings within the community to source stories. She then consults oral historians, scholars, cultural ethnographers, and, when she can, people who have lived through the events to be depicted.

“She has a way of making people step out of their own struggles into a larger understanding of what constitutes a life,”

said her longtime friend, artist Amalia Mesa-Bains.

In the 1970s, she became involved with the feminist community around the Woman’s Building, an education and exhibition space near MacArthur Park that took the Virginia Woolf essay “A Room of One’s Own” as its guiding principle.

In 1976, she cofounded the mural-making organization Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC).

The Great Wall of Los Angeles

She worked with the community on The Great Wall of Los Angeles. Begun in the late 1970s and still in progress, it is the longerst mural in the world, measuring more than a half mile long.

“If you can disappear a river, how much easier is it to disappear the history of a people?”

Baca was a woman, a Chicana, and a lesbian, at a time when the first two were thought of as mutually exclusive identities, and the third was not discussed at all.

“Judy calls herself a bridge, Professor of Latin American and Latinx Art Anna Indych-López said, “She claimed a space for women of color within feminism, and a space for feminism within Chicano and Chicana art.”

“She’s not trying to replace one canon with another, but in a way she’s visualizing history as a process of contestation in and of itself.”

Durón, Maximilíano. “Chicana Muralist Judith F. Baca Tells the Stories of California – ARTnews.Com.” ARTnews.Com, ARTnews.com, 19 Apr. 2017, https://www.artnews.com/artnews/news/concrete-history-chicana-muralist-judith-f-baca-goes-from-the-great-wall-to-the-museum-wall-8143/.

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Concrete History: Chicana Muralist Judith F. Baca Goes from the Great Wall to the Museum Wall

Her work shows history presented there is from the perspective of those who have not always been recognized—women, minorities, queer people.

Peering along the Wall’s expanse, it quickly becomes obvious that the history presented there is from the perspective of those who have not always been recognized—women, minorities, queer people. Still, it helps to look at it with the woman who conceived it 40 years ago, Chicana artist Judith F. Baca, who, at 70, is an electric presence in rose-tinted sunglasses. Before completing her designs, Baca told me as we stood in front of the Wall on a typical L.A. December day (60 degrees and sunny), she consulted with people who lived in the San Fernando Valley; she wanted to hear their stories. To execute the mural, she enlisted hundreds of teenagers, many of them drawn from L.A.’s juvenile justice program. They completed it in 1983.

Artists have always worked with assistants—some with small armies of them—but Baca didn’t fit into any paradigm the art world recognized. Back in the ’70s, “they called me a teacher, a social worker, even a gang member—everything but an artist,” she said. “This is not what art did. It did not intervene in social spaces, mitigating problems that these kids were facing. It was so foreign to the arts to be engaged in social justice action or transformative action within a community.”

[xicanartists-blog]

The Great Wall of Los Angeles

The Great Wall of Los Angeles is located in the San Fernando Valley in flood control channel also known as the Tujunga wash. Judith Baca wanted to paint the history of Los Angeles, but not the version people read in books. Baca wanted to show other stories, stories that were never told in books. With the help of 400 people Baca was able to paint her vision in a 2,754 feet mural. It took seven summmers to complete, but to Baca it is not done just yet - she wants the mural to reach a mile one day.

For More information and to make a donation please visit - 

http://sparcinla.org/programs/the-great-wall-mural-los-angeles/

[xicanartists-blog]

Chicana Artist Spotlight: Judith Baca

Judith Francisca Baca was born on September 20, 1946 in Los Angeles, California to Mexican American parents. Baca had a hard time learning English as a second language and was not allowed to speak Spanish at school like if it was forbidden. While being in elementary School her teacher would tell her to sit in the corner and paint while others studied - this is her love for art started. Going into high school and learning English a teacher encouraged her to start drawing and painting more because she has such a beautiful talent. Later she graduated from Bishop Alemany High School in 1964 and continued her studies at California Sate University Northridge where she got her bachelors degree in 1969 and masters in 1979. Judith is now a Chicana artist, activist as well as a professor and keeps influencing the Chicano culture to this day.