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.
BLVR: What is the origin of this newer mural process, and why did you feel the need to use this new technology?
JB: I began the first digital mural lab in ’93, to look at how new technology could give us the capacity to put a mural on a building in advance of actually putting it there. It became clear that, in just a minute, we could advance hundreds of drawings virtually and see things from different perspectives. So we began to use these technologies to speed up our process, which had been laborious. Then I began to play with the idea that our drawings could be refined through digital capacities, using programs like Painter, Photoshop, Illustrator. We are now able to take our stylus and draw directly on the screen. That’s advanced in the last five years, profoundly. More and more, it’s becoming totally intuitive and functional to use the technology to accelerate our work and to reduce the cost of doing that work.
BLVR: Along with all these new tools, how did you develop the nonwoven cellulose fabric that can adhere to a wall?
JB: There were other people who were trying it. I think Kent Twitchell did his orchestra piece in downtown Los Angeles [Harbor Freeway Overture] with this nonwoven material. We saw it working. People in Philadelphia started to work with it too. I was working with building facade materials, die-bond materials that were metal for the creation of my Denver International Airport piece [La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra] twenty years ago, so that the work could be produced off-site and then installed. It created accessibility. We didn’t have to dangle off an eight-story building to put it up. The nonwoven material we’re working with now is very similar to what is used on the inside of clothing—to stiffen a collar, for example. The fact that it’s nonwoven means it’s pretty indestructible. You look at FedEx envelopes: you can’t tear them. There are new materials that are foolproof. The adhering of that material, the nonwoven fabric, onto the concrete is like a layer of paint, and it’s submerged in the same clear Rhoplex or emulsion that the pigmentation gets. It goes on lightweight and adheres to the wall. It looks exactly as if it were painted there.
BLVR: How long will it take to adhere Generation on Fire to the wall?
JB: Probably one day. It depends on the wind factors. It depends on how much equipment we have, how many people we can put on it, but it can go up quickly.
BLVR: What are some of the challenges you find working like this, as opposed to the old school way of working with paint?
JB: One of the challenges I recognized in the museum [painting the mural sections in a Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition] was that we were painting only seventy feet at a time. That meant I couldn’t look down the wall and see three hundred and fifty feet or more of the mural at one time. If a certain red—let’s say in the first hundred feet of the mural—had to be echoed three hundred feet later, I couldn’t see it in advance. I had to imagine it, either on the computer or in drawings. That is one of the things I’m kind of missing: the capacity to see the overall view of the mural.
And the other thing is that you’re not in full daylight. That’s great because you’re not dying in the heat, but the other part is that the light is different for color mixing.
BLVR: You have to reset your eyes, possibly go outside, and come back in to try and recalibrate the way you’re looking at it?
JB: If I hadn’t had so much experience on the site, I probably couldn’t have done it, but I could kind of calibrate, knowing the difference. I know what bright California sunlight at midday looks like.
BLVR: That would be a Valley girl skill set.
JB: Yep.
BLVR: The color palette in Generation on Fire is bright. Could you talk about how you chose the colors?
JB: We do color trials and we mess with it then. You can’t mess with it on the wall, because it’s too expensive. If you have to repaint figures—pants, for example—you’re running up hundreds of dollars in expensive paint. The colorations are done with an understanding of the Mexican mural palette, gravitating away from a European color style. I’m much more interested in what the Mayans did, much more interested in pre-Hispanic work and the Mexican muralists’ use of color—with the exception of Orozco: his colors were too muted. But in Renaissance paintings, or in Italian or Flemish paintings—think of all the paintings that are classics—they begin with a muted background. They might begin with an olive green base and then bring up color from that. What we are doing is the reverse. We are looking to bring the most vibrant colors possible, and that partially has to do with the sun it will be exposed to, because we know it’s going to fade. The second part of it is that we’re looking at something that is becoming profoundly different from the European precedent.
BLVR: How does your feminist perspective inform your process?
JB: My point of view is to have wide-open arms to contributions and people. I accept the input of many, and then help coalesce that into a statement that is inclusive and incorporative. 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. I look for the inclusion of every mastery that is around me. I’m creating a dance in public that is unified and that our brushes can pass between each other. That’s the gift that I bring. As an artist, I am a feminist and I’m also a Chicana. I am a person that is of this land and is bringing up the story from the land because it’s where I was born and raised. I’m not a visitor. I have made a life here. I was born in Watts, grew up in Pacoima. In this work, I’m making something that tells the story of a river that was turned to concrete, and the recovery of that river, and the stories of the people.
BLVR: It’s beautiful because it’s multiple perspectives, told through your eyes, which can embody all of them.
JB: All together. Yes, this is a woman’s perspective. It’s the creation of family and community, and it’s fully inclusive.
