Descripción de la Exposición
"Judy Baca: Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, a Retrospective" is the first comprehensive retrospective of the work of the internationally renowned Chicana muralist, public intellectual and community activist, Judy Baca. Baca is a painter and muralist, community arts pioneer, and scholarly-educator who has been teaching in the UC system for more than 30 years. As founder of the first City of Los Angeles Mural Program in 1974 – which evolved into the non-profit Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) – Baca has been engaged in the creation of sites of public memory within historically disenfranchised communities since 1976. She continues to serve as SPARC's artistic director while employing digital technology to co-create collaborative murals at the UCLA/SPARC Cesar Chavez Digital Mural Lab.
During the past decade, art as a vehicle for protest and social justice has gained incredible momentum and salience; it is now part of any comprehensive discussion about contemporary arts in the U.S. However, in mid-1970s Los Angeles, the art of "contestation” and place-making was already finding voice in Judy Baca's work. During this tumultuous decade, Baca pioneered a collaborative model that enabled young people to weave "hidden" histories of their underrepresented communities into monumental public artworks. These murals celebrated their people's contributions and articulated their stories and struggles. For the disenfranchised people living in the greater Los Angeles basin, in California, and in the larger U.S., Baca's works became epic narratives, connecting youth with their diverse heritage and creating new "sites of public memory."
In our galleries, the exhibition is divided thematically into three sections that present different aspects of Baca’s artistic production. Gallery A is the Womanist Gallery, wherein we see female power presented. This gallery delves with greater insight into Baca’s more intimate history, and her very personal explorations of feminism, gender, and body politics. This gallery also focuses on Baca’s personal role models and their place in Baca’s history, upbringing, and understanding of the world. The Womanist Gallery lastly, features never-before-seen, surrealist ink drawings by Judy Baca, exploring her struggle with personal relationships.
Gallery B will feature a Baca Public Art Survey, exploring her pivotal and career-defining work through the Social and Public Arts Resource Center, an organization Judy founded in 1976. In a city and time where community public art was dominated by men, Baca demonstrated that a woman could not only produce at large scale, but that decades later would become the leading innovator in this media.
In Gallery C, visitors will discover the history of Baca’s first masterpiece, the Great Wall of Los Angeles. This half mile long mural occupies the Tujunga Wash in the San Fernando Valley. The mural tells the story of California from prehistoric times to the 1950s and takes special care in presenting the lesser-known histories of the ethnic groups who inhabit this state. To understand the immensity of this project, viewers are invited to participate in an immersive audiovisual experience of the monumental piece.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
One of America’s leading visual artists Dr. Judith F. Baca has been creating public art for four decades. Powerful in size and subject matter, Baca’s murals bring art to where people live and work. In 1974, Baca founded the City of Los Angeles’ first mural program, which produced over 400 murals and employed thousands of local participants, and evolved into an arts organization known as the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). She continues to serve as SPARC’S artistic director and focuses her creative energy in the UCLA@SPARC Digital/ Mural Lab, employing digital technology to promote social justice and participatory public arts projects. She is an emeritus Professor of the University of California Los Angeles, where she was a senior professor in Studio Art 1980-1996 at the University of California, Irvine and Chicana/o Studies and World Art and Cultures Departments from 1996 until 2018.
Beginning with the awareness that the land has memory, she creates art that is shaped by an interactive relationship of history, people and place. Baca’s public artworks focus on revealing and reconciling diverse peoples’ struggles for their rights and affirm the connections of each community to place. She gives form to monuments that rise up out of neighborhoods. Together with the people who live there, they co-create monumental public art places that become “sites of public memory.” Baca has stood for art in service of equity for all people. Her public arts initiatives reflect the lives and concerns of populations that have been historically disenfranchised, including women, the working poor, youth, the elderly and immigrant communities, throughout Los Angeles and increasingly in national and international venues.
Her most well-known work is The Great Wall of Los Angeles. It is located in San Fernando Valley, the mural spans half a mile and still is a work in progress engaging another generation of youth. The mural-making process exemplified community involvement, employing more than 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds, artists, oral historians and scholars. In 2017, The Great Wall of Los Angeles received national recognition on the National Registry of Historic Places by the US Department of the Interior. In 2012, the Los Angeles Unified School District named a school after her called the Judith F. Baca Arts Academy, located in Watts, her birthplace. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship.
Exposición. 31 oct de 2024 - 09 feb de 2025 / Artium - Centro Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo / Vitoria-Gasteiz, Álava, España
Formación. 07 nov de 2024 - 28 nov de 2024 / Museo Nacional del Prado / Madrid, España
