March 13, 2019
"THE GREAT WALL OF LOS ANGELES"
by Judy Baca
Begun in 1974 and originally painted over five summers, Sparc founder Judy Baca's 1/2 mile long masterpiece running along Coldwater Canyon Ave employed a diverse group of 400 youth and their families, working with a team of scholars and artists—including Isabel Castro, Yreina Cervantez, Judith Hernandez, Olga Munoz, Patssi Valdez, Margaret Garcia, Christina Schlesinger, Judy Chicago, and Gary Tokumoto. While many of our monuments glamorize the past, Baca's landmark, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, pays tribute to working people of California while also acknowledging a checkered history of injustices toward its women and minorities. The detail above tells the tale of Guatemalan immigrant Luisa Moreno, a labor movement activist who convened the first national Latino civil rights assembly in 1939. @judy_baca/ @sparcinla/