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March 19, 2010 | Future education | No Comment

Los Angeles 2010 by Judy Baca

We are a city of nations: a myriad of peoples from all over the world joined by a sprawling network of freeways and shared geography.

Los Angeles 2010 brings even more diversity and global economic struggles combined now with local downturns that doubly affect Angelinos. Our schools face challenges to educate diverse children in a nearly bankrupt state, as those under 18 have become the largest segment of our population.

The arts play a critical role in the up lifting of the human spirit and the expression of our deepest shared values as people. They can bridge difference between people,
articulate a vision of hope and change for a community. They can, through creative collaborative processes, teach us how to live and work together in the most productive ways.

In this next year, we at the Social and Public Art Resource center will bring together another group of youth to work on the restoration of my ½ mile long mural on the history of California Mural called the Great Wall of Los Angeles Mural which focuses on the contributions made by immigrants and populations of color in the Los Angeles area. This work now 33 years old in some areas will be completely restored and a new interpretive Green Bridge built over the site which will serve as viewing station with interpretive panels. Our plans to extend the mural will empower another generation of youth to continue beyond my lifetime to interpret our evolving history.

In addition in 2010, we will create two interactive Digital Murals: Tiny Ripples of Hope and Seeing Through Others Eyes and install them in the new Robert F. Kennedy K-12 Learning Center on the site of the historic Ambassador Hotel. This work will through new touch screen technology and geo-mapping offer the images of the mural to allow students to delve into the representations in the mural of the issues defined by Robert F. Kennedy as the most salient issues of the 1960’s and also of our time:

-War, Healthcare, Poverty, Intolerance, Environment and Education

The UCLA/SPARC Cesar Chavez Digital Mural Lab and LAUSD RFK Learning Center will collaborate to produce a multi-layered interface program, which will enable students to interact with the library murals through touch screen technology to explore the mural’s content and accompanying curriculum. The students will expand through real life application the social justice curriculum by social action in their communities that is recorded and shared. The interactive curriculum based program will use the digital murals as a launching pad to link to bibliographies, articles, images, and recorded interviews collected and geo-tagged during the artist’s research period and the student’s own exploration in their own diverse neighborhoods creating a virtual map of issues in the City of Los Angeles.

February 12, 2010 | Blog - Media - Press release - Upcoming projects | No Comment

Cesar Chavez Mosaics Complete in San Jose Monument

April 2011

Cesar Chavez Mosaics Complete in San Jose Monument

March 2010

Mosaic construction has begun! Come take a look.

The exterior niches that now stand at San Jose University are now being created into mosaics in the SPARC gallery. A ton of glass (500 lbs) has been specially ordered from Cuernavaca, Mexico, the original factory that produced Siqueiros’s mosaic tile. Each exterior niche stands 4ft X 9ft tall and is a representation of Dolores Huerta, Gandhi, and a female and male farm worker from Salinas Valley. The mosaics will be completed this year. For more information on visiting the SPARC gallery as the mosaic production progresses please contact us a info@sparcmurals.org.

IMAGE EXPLANATIONS

The arch’s main mural depicts a contemplative Chavez over the fields of California, where the great boycotts took place. In the sky, Chavez’s meeting with Robert Kennedy during his great fast (accompanied by his wife and his mother) is highlighted, as fasting was a cornerstone to his philosophy of non-violence. Also in the sky, the virgin Guadalupe is also blessing his actions. Finally, a calaca (skeleton-skull) is depicted to represent the deaths resulting from the pesticide clouds being sprayed in the fields.

“A word as to the education of the heart. We don’t believe that this can be imparted through books, it can only be imparted through the loving touch of the teacher.” -César E. Chávez

The concept of the Monument is to commemorate Chavez through his ideals rather than to create a traditional European approach to a fallen soldier or important personage through a bust or bronze statute. It is not his personality that is to be remembered but his ideals and beliefs carried out in his actions to improve the conditions of the campesino, which inspired so many to join his efforts to achieve social justice. A key element to the monument is to teach the next generation how to choose to live a life in the center of your values and beliefs as Cesar Chavez did. Modeled on a Mayan corbelled arch with rounded mission arches, this site pays tribute to Chavez’s respective Spanish and indigenous roots. This arch is placed at the opposite site of the small plaza to necessitate pedestrian passage through its opening which will encompass the viewer with images of Chavez’s life inside the arch.

The Cesar Chavez Mosaic Production has begun at SPARC. These pieces will be installed at San Jose University, CA. The mosaic team is composed by Francois Bardol and Martha Ramirez, and is supported by the UCLA/SPARC Cesar Chavez Digital Mural Lab.

January 23, 2010 | Press release | No Comment

Public Art – Private Works: Retrospective of the Work of Judith Baca at Mesa College

This is an exhibition of paintings, drawings and renderings of Chicana muralist Judith Baca’s public artwork. This is one of her major retrospectives of and details the intricacies of creating monumental public works, while maintaining a private practice.

The exhibit included well known ‘private works,’ personal pieces confronting identity and social issues: photographs and a silk-screen print of Judy Baca impersonating a tough and sassy Pachuca, a painting revealing the tragic cost of America’s involvement in the Middle East, and the colorfully ironic Pancho Trinity (1993), a set of mixed media sculptures that reinvent the iconic kitschy image of the ‘sleeping Mexican’ to comment on the
struggle of immigrant groups.

November 30, 2009 | Blog - Media | No Comment

Photos from Protest on November 19, against Fee Spike

November 17, 2009 | Blog - Future education - Media | No Comment

November 18,19 UCLA Walkouts

The main demands of the UC strike are the following:

1. We demand that the Regents vote no on the proposed fee increases.

2. We demand that the UC stop cuts and layoffs, and end its aggressive union-busting tactics.

3. We demand transparency of the UC budget, including complete figures on how much of the additional revenue from fees will be diverted for construction and used as bond collateral.

4. We demand that the Regents expand enrollment of underrepresented groups and ensure equal access to education for all by maintaining all educational institutions as sanctuary spaces for undocumented students and workers and by providing adequate financial aid for undocumented and underrepresented students.

5. We demand an explanation for the failure of the UC leadership to make an effective case for public higher education. As both students and taxpayers, we demand leaders who can make that case, and an administration whose transparency can once again inspire the confidence of the state and its citizens.

November 7, 2009 | Blog - Press release - Upcoming projects | No Comment

Great Wall Restoration

Press conference today at the Great Wall of Los Angeles:

The Longest Mural in the World
The Great Wall of Los Angeles is getting a face-lift.
After many years, the mural has suffered extensive damage due to sun exposure and lack of restoration funds. Repair and repainting of the largest monument to interracial harmony in America continued this month and will startup again in the summer of 2010. SPARC has recruited a team made up of muralists, UCLA students and community youth, some include Great Wall alumni from the original 400 youth workers of thirty years ago.

“As SPARC’s first public art project and signature piece, I am proud to announce that the Great Wall has been declared a site of public memory worth preservation by California’s Cultural and Historic Endowment,” stated Judy Baca, Founder and Artistic Director of SPARC. The mural chronicles the contributions made by ethnic and diverse people to the history of America, in particular California; it goes from pre-historic time to the 1950’s.

About SPARC:

Creating Sites of Public Memory Since 1976. SPARC is committed to socially responsible art and art makers; to helping individual communities find their voice, giving it public expression, and having others hear it; breaking down barriers, real and perceived, between communities. What SPARC does is as much about public good as it is about public art.

See Great Wall Restoration in Faces

First 1000 feet restored.

Green Bridge

In addition to the mural’s face-lift, SPARC has partnered with the well-respected architecture firm, wHY Architects, to build an interpretive green bridge, a new component to the project. This newly designed replacement bridge will become a central public entrance and viewing platform for the mural and river. The defining metaphor of the Great Wall is: “a tattoo on the scar where the river once ran.” Therefore the “green bridge” will be built of recycled debris of the Los Angeles River.

Watch the first day of mural clean up.

Student Testimony

April 7, 2009 | Blog - Press release - Upcoming projects | No Comment

The Save LA Murals Program Presentation

The Save LA Murals Presentation

An Audio Slideshow by Prof. Judith F. Baca – Presented to the City of Los Angeles Arts Commission on April 2nd 2009

March 11, 2009 | Blog - Media - Press release | No Comment

Judy Baca in the LA Weekly

March 11, 2009 | Blog - Media - Press release | No Comment

From the LA Times "A moveable street scene"

March 11, 2009 | Blog - Press release | No Comment

UCLA Magazine: Writing on the Wall

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The UCLA@SPARC Digital/Mural Lab led by UCLA Professor Judith F. Baca is the leading research, teaching and production facility in the country devoted to the creation of large-scale digitally generated murals, public art productions, and community cultural development practices.

The Lab is located in a community setting (the Old Venice Police Station) at the non-profit, Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) founded in 1976. (SPARCinLA.org)

In a sequence of 8 courses offered in three departments at undergraduate and graduate levels, students work in community settings with local community members on important issues engaging their imagination and academic research to produce permanent public artworks that tell the stories of diverse communities.

While dreaming hopeful solutions, these public artworks articulate solutions to difficult problems such as low achievement in the LAUSD schools, immigration, dropout rates, racial violence, substance abuse and economic disparity in Los Angeles neighborhoods.