UCLA professor dedicates herself to exposing art

A half-mile long representation of California’s vibrant history coats the walls of the Tujunga Flood Control Channel in the San Fernando Valley.

The massive mural features images from sprawling land and pre-historic wildlife, to Senator Joseph McCarthy and accusatory judges in their reign during the Red Scare.

The Great Wall of Los Angeles is just one of hundreds of murals Judith Baca has created.

Baca, an artist, activist and professor in the UCLA Chicana and Chicano Studies department, works with communities to create historically relevant public works of art.

She said she became interested in public works when she was in art school because she was concerned that art was confined to museums and not reaching her community.

“Muralism was the way of taking the work to the street, making it accessible for people who didn’t go to museums or galleries. It was making a populous work that belonged to everyone because it involved everyone,” she said.

Baca is currently pioneering techniques in mural creation and preservation at the César Chávez Digital Mural Lab in Venice, which is where her class “M186 Beyond the Mexican Mural” is held.

She and her team are developing ways of utilizing technology to ease the creation of murals, as well as the replication of murals in the event that a replacement is needed.

Baca said she also hopes to utilize the Internet to create an archive of the research and history that goes along with each mural and specialized curriculum for teachers who wish to use it as well as curriculum for her own students.

The professor said the technology she uses now has come a long way from 1974, when she created the first mural program in Los Angeles because there was very little community programming for adolescents. Many of her programs are directed toward at-risk youth. She later wrote Los Angeles’ first mural preservation program.

The Digital Mural Lab, where Baca currently conducts her research, is sponsored by the Social and Public Art Resource Center, a non-profit organization located in Venice and co-founded by Baca in 1976.

SPARC is dedicated to preserving, producing and educating youth about community-based public art, according to the organizaton’s Web site.

“(Baca) has been able to really put SPARC at the forefront of the issues facing community based public art,” said Debra Padilla, the executive director of SPARC who has worked with Baca for over 15 years.

In addition to serving as artistic director of SPARC, Baca is vice chair of the César Chávez Center and a professor of art for world arts and cultures at UCLA.

She came to UCLA in 1993 when students participating in a hunger strike for an improved Chicana and Chicano studies department requested a place for her in the faculty.

She has been teaching within the University of California system since 1980.

Baca currently teaches several classes at UCLA, including Beyond the Mexican Mural, an off-campus course held in the Digital Mural Lab. The students in the class are currently creating a mural for the University Elementary School, to be installed at the end of the quarter.

They are also creating a condition report on the murals in Los Angeles to be submitted to local legislators in hopes of receiving funding for their restoration and preservation.

The research Baca does in the lab is applied directly to the curriculum for her students, which is aimed at creating real projects rather than proposals.

“She shows how art can change things socially, which doesn’t really happen anywhere else,” said Ava Porter, a SPARC communications representative and photographer who is also a UCLA alumna and Baca’s former student.

“A lot of times it’s artists commenting on society … but Judy organizes people together to create an art piece that says something. To me, that’s high art,” she said, adding that Baca’s work is not hidden in a museum.

Baca is currently working on several projects in the lab in addition to teaching her class.

Her main projects are an extension and restoration of The Great Wall along with the addition of a symbolic bridge and a memorial to Robert F. Kennedy at the site of his assassination in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

She is also working on another dance-based piece for the Latino Fine Art Center in Dallas, Texas.

Baca said she hopes to inspire her viewers with the swirling skirts in the Dallas piece to dance and to feel the movement she creates in her work.

“I was thinking that the reason I’m so in love with this is that dancing is the opposite of dying; it’s about life,” Baca said.