Judith Francisca Baca (born September 20, 1946) is an American artist, activist, and professor of Chicano studies, world arts, and cultures based at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, California. Baca is the director of the mural project that created the Great Wall of Los Angeles, which is the largest communal mural project in the world.
Biography
Early life
Baca was born in Los Angeles on September 20, 1946, to Mexican American parents. She was raised in Watts, Los Angeles which is a predominately Black and Latino area. She lived in an all-female household composed of her mother, her aunts Rita and Delia, and her grandmother Francisca. Her military father never knew of her existence and moved back to the east coast after her birth. Her grandmother was an herbal healer and practiced curanderismo, which profoundly influenced her sense of indigenous Chicano culture.
Baca's mother later married Clarence Ferrari in 1952, and Baca has a half-brother Gary and half-sister Diane. Afterward the three of them moved to Pacoima, Los Angeles. This neighborhood was drastically different from Watts – Mexican-Americans were minorities in Pacoima.
Education
Baca was not allowed to speak Spanish in elementary school, as it was prohibited, but she did not know English very well. Her teacher would tell her to go paint in the corner while the other children studied. After some time, Baca started getting better in classes once she was able to understand the textbooks. With the encouragement of her art teacher, she began drawing and painting. She later graduated from Bishop Alemany High School in 1964.
She then attended California State University, Northridge (CSUN) and earned her bachelor's degree in 1969 and a master's degree in fine art in 1979. Judy was the first Baca to attend college, and actually quit for a brief period of time after becoming tired of being poor. She sought out a job in production illustration and worked there until she was inspired to go back to college and get a Bachelors of Fine Art. While there, she learned and studied modern abstract art. She wanted to make art that was accessible beyond the constraints of the gallery and the museum. She wanted to make art for the people she loved, but she knew that they didn't go to galleries. "I thought to myself, if I get my work into galleries, who will go there? People in my family hadn't ever been to a gallery in their entire lives. My neighbors never went to galleries...And it didn't make sense to me at the time to put art behind some guarded wall." After completing graduate school, Baca continued her education, studying muralism at Taller Siqueiros in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Works of art
Las Vistas Nuevas
In the summer of 1970, Baca decided to create a mural in Boyle Heights in order to bring community together. In the first team she had twenty members from four different gangs, and the group decided on the name Las Vistas Nuevas ("New Views"). The mural they would create would show images that would be familiar to the Mexican-Americans who were living in the neighborhood. "I want to use public space to create a public voice for, and a public consciousness about people who are, in fact, the majority of the population but who are not represented in any visual way.
Raspados Mojados
In Raspados Mojados Baca used a street vendor cart as a sculptural installation to address immigration issues and the misrepresentations of Mexicans living in the United States. Los Angeles street vendors constantly sell ice cream as well as Mexican snacks, fruit cocktails, corn on the cob, and raspados. This has brought attention to Los Angeles and has attempted to pass pushcarts loitering laws into any city. At the front of the cart a painting of a Mexican man captioned “illegal alien, undocumented worker” which is the main focus of the painting presented on the cart. On one side of the cart there is a painting of a man who is being dragged across a fence representing the Mexican/us border to the U.S. It is labeled Bracero Wars or also known as the Mexican Farm Labor Program. Bracero is a Spanish term meaning "manual laborer" or "one who works using his arms.”