The River Wall Comes Indoors, Judy Baca Brings the Great Wall’s 1960s to the Skirball
New mural sections on the civil rights decade, drawing studies and a video installation open October 22 in Brentwood.
Judy Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles is writing its next chapter indoors. The 1960s, A Generation on Fire, Judy Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles opens at the Skirball Cultural Center on Thursday, October 22, with recently completed mural sections on the 1960s that will soon be added to the existing mural, along with drawing studies and an immersive video installation.
Baca conceived the Great Wall in 1974 as a monument to the people of California, a visual history of ethnic peoples from prehistoric times to the 1950s. It became the first public art project of the Social and Public Art Resource Center, or SPARC, which she co-founded, and it was painted on the walls of the LA River over five summers. The project employed 400 young people and their families, who worked with artists, oral historians, ethnologists, scholars and hundreds of community members.
Today Baca’s team of researchers, digital assistant illustrators, muralists and junior muralists in training uses a mural scrolling system that lets more than 400 feet of artwork be painted, moved and viewed inside a single room. That is how new sections of the wall are now painted indoors and sent traveling to institutions, galleries and community spaces. The new panels take in the decade of the Civil Rights Movement, and the title borrows the activist Tom Hayden’s phrase for the young people involved, “a generation on fire.”
“I want to use public space to create a public voice, and a public consciousness about the presence of people who are, in fact, the majority of the population but who are not represented in any visual way,” Baca has said, in words the Skirball quotes on its exhibition page.
Baca founded the first City of Los Angeles Mural Program in 1974, still serves as SPARC’s artistic director and is a UCLA professor emeritus. Her work also hangs across town in the fifth-floor Murals gallery of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, alongside pieces by Diego Rivera, JR and Banksy, Time Out reported. Read more in The Story Machine, the Lucas Museum Opens in Exposition Park.
Vicki Phung Smith curated the Skirball exhibition. The museum, off North Sepulveda Boulevard, is open Tuesday through Friday from noon to 5 p.m. and on weekends from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with free parking on site.
