Judy Baca Expands Her Epic Mural Project With a Fresh Reveal

Feb 23, 2025

The artist is debuting the latest addition to "The Great Wall of Los Angeles" at L.A.'s Other Art Fair.

Sarah Cascone February 21, 2025 ShareShare This Article

You could make the case that Judy Baca, with her decades-long dedication to bringing socially engaged public art to the streets of Los Angeles, is the city’s most important artist of the last 50 years. But her strictly non-commercial approach to art has meant she’s been conspicuously absent from most art fairs—until now.

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“I’ve never been a person who has been engaged in commercialization of work and getting things into sales and all that,” Baca told me in a Zoom call from her Bergamot studio at the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), the non-profit community arts center in Santa Monica that she founded in 1976. All around her were some 400 feet of murals in various stages of completion.

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Baca is one of roughly 140 artists bringing their work, sans galleries, to the Other Art Fair, a new addition to Los Angeles’s annual art fair week. She’s featuring the latest addition to her monumental mural The Great Wall of Los Angeles, a 10-foot-tall, 22-foot-wide painting titled The 1968 East L.A. Walkouts that will soon be erected on the concrete walls of a tributary to the Los Angeles River known as Tujunga Wash.

She’s excited to show off the newly developed technology that is being used to create the new chapters of The Great Wall, which she began working on way back in 1974. The project was intended to beautify the river, but also to literally paint a picture of California history that recognizes the contributions of women and minorities.

The fair has paid Baca to make a printed reproduction of The 1968 East L.A. Walkouts to exhibit during the event in a special “guest artist” spotlight—and will donate the work afterward to a local community center.

Judy Baca, The East L.A. Student Walkouts (2025). Photo courtesy of the artist and the Other Fair.

“We’re looking for muralism to actually step into being collectible, and not being seen just as a street art or a lesser art form, but a real, serious, fine art form,” Baca said.

Murals have long been a defining feature of Los Angeles streets, and perhaps no one has been more instrumental in that movement than Baca.

She began working on murals in city parks after the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks hired her as an art teacher. Drawing on the traditions of the Mexican social mural movement, she painted with at-risk youth, many of them gang members. Art, she realized, could help keep them out of trouble.

Judy Baca on a scissor lift in front of The Great Wall of Los Angeles in 1983. Photo by Linda Eber, courtesy of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) Archives, SPARCinLA.org

“I gave an impassioned speech to the City Council for my kids in the neighborhoods of East L.A.,” Baca said. “I didn’t know what I was doing then. I was a young girl, really, saying ‘you need to pay my people.'”

Based on Baca’s proposal, the Los Angeles City Council formed the first Citywide Mural Program. Her work on The Great Wall, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2017, came about thanks to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. After the flood of 1938, the Army encased the Los Angeles River in concrete to ward off future disasters.

“They came to me and said, ‘We’re thinking about this aesthetic plan division. Want to deal with this area of the Tujunga Wash?'” Baca recalled. She had little way of knowing she would still be “dealing” with the area half a century later.

Judy Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, Wilma Rudolf. Photo courtesy of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) Archives, SPARCinLA.org.

What appealed to Baca about the project was a chance to bring young people together from different neighborhoods, different ethnicities, even different gangs. They could work below street level, out of sight—and out of the way of gunfire—being paid to create a mural project that would remind them of their shared history.

“The first summer, we painted 1,000 feet,” Baca said. “And we kept going, almost every other year because it took a year every time to raise money. I pretty much got money from the juvenile justice system—you know, programs for economically disadvantaged youth. Although in those days, they said culturally disadvantaged! Can you imagine that?”

The original half-mile mural series, as completed in 1983, covered California history only up until the 1950s. Now, the team at SPARC is working on the murals that will grace the opposite side of the river, continuing the narrative through to the present day.

A section of Judy Baca’s The Great Wall of Los Angeles along Coldwater Canyon Ave in Los Angeles, California. Photo: Michele and Tom Grimm / Alamy Stock Photo.

“We will be wrapping around the other side of the river so that it’s circular,” Baca said. “My design team has proposed ideas for each of the segments. I will refine them and put them into a Punto system, which is the Mexican division of space, very much like the Renaissance notions of the golden section, but it’s actually much more dynamic. And that creates a kind of harmony and a movement down the channel.”

The mural will cover a wide range of events including the occupation of Alcatraz by Native American activists from 1968 to 1971, the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973, and the pandemic of 2020.

The mural at the Other Art Fair immortalizes Los Angeles student Freddie Resendez, protesting with the Brown Berets, a social justice organization formed as part of the Chicano Movement that wore paramilitary uniforms. The group led a walkout at Los Angeles high schools, protesting the educational conditions there for Mexican American students and demanding bilingual education, as well as the teaching of Mexican American culture and history.

“It’s important for people to know how recent that fight was,” Baca said.

Judy Baca at work in the studio on The East L.A. Student Walkouts (2025). Photo by Gary Coronado, courtesy of SPARC and the Other Art Fair.

Once the piece is installed in the river, it will be viewable from a new footbridge Baca has worked to erect in the middle of The Great Wall as a viewing platform.

“It’s taken us almost 10 years to get it up with all the bureaucracies and the difficulties during the pandemic and all of that, but we got it up,” she said. “It’s a beautiful bridge.”

Previous chapters of the mural had to be painted on site, working only when weather allowed. There was always just a short, nine-week window in the summer when Baca and her team could work. But with global warming, painting in the river had become untenable.

“You had to bring in a whole encampment,” Baca said. “We’d have 50 people on site in really bad conditions—118 degree weather, just terrible.”

Judy Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles in progress at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) Archives, SPARCinLA.org

In 2023, that changed with a residency at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Thanks to new technology, they can work in the air-conditioned studio on a substrate called Polytab. It’s a lightweight non-woven fabric that can be unrolled section by section for work in smaller spaces, and then installed along the concrete riverbanks once the paintings are done.

“We’ve been inventing new methods of doing this work,” Baca said. There’s also a vertical printer that sprays directly on this substrate, transferring the drawing at full scale and dramatically speeding up the process.

“The experimentation is not complete, but it is possible that we could spray paint up the mural in the river,” she added. “We’re looking at the color treatments and they are pretty good. And if that’s the case, then when it fades we can replace it segment by segment. And then these pieces can be sold or sent to museums for exhibitions.”

Judy Baca outside the Social and Public Art Resource Center. Photo: Gary Coronado, courtesy of SPARC and the Other Art Fair.

The potential in this technology would mean bringing mural painting to sites where it previously would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, for an artist to access.

The goal is to finish 2,740 feet in new murals in time for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. It’s a fitting deadline given that Baca was one of 10 artists tapped to create a mural along the L.A. freeway for the official Olympic Arts Festival ahead of the city’s 1984 games.

Baca’s contribution, a painting of a woman running across a finish line, titled Hitting the Wall, celebrates the inaugural competition of the women’s marathon in that year’s games. It is one of the only surviving works from the Olympic Mural Project still on display—and that’s only because Baca won a court battle to resurrect it after the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) unceremoniously whitewashed it in 2019.

Judy Baca, Hitting the Wall (1984) in Los Angeles, California. Photo: Ben Martin / Getty Images.

In the years since its most recent restoration, the mural has once again become a popular graffiti target—in sharp contrast to the surrounding blank walls, which are regularly cleaned.

“No maintenance plan exists for the murals on the freeway,” Baca said. “And Caltrans has now decided to charge us $3,000 daily to close the lane each time we clean it.”

Fortunately, however, the graffiti removal is aided by a material SPARC has developed called Mural Shield, which coats each artwork with a wax-based protective coating. That means most graffiti comes off with just hot water.

There are no immediate plans to clean Hitting the Wall, but it will certainly happen before the Olympics. And Baca is also in talks with the mayor’s office to fund an effort to uncover and restore the other Olympic murals that have been painted over since the 1984 games—though she worries such an effort might be pushed to the back burner with efforts to rebuild from last month’s fires.

It’s been a stressful few weeks for the artist in the lead-up to the fair. With the Palisades Fire rapidly encroaching on Santa Monica, Baca made the decision to arrange for the emergency evacuation of her other major project, World Wall. A traveling series of nine massive murals on canvas, each weighing 210 pounds, the project is meant as a vision of world peace, and cost $10,000 to transport. (It was first shown in its entirety at the Geffen Contemporary at L.A. MOCA in 2022.)

“We got it out in the middle of the night,” she said.

Then came troubling news from the National Endowment for the Arts, which has been helping fund the expansion of The Great Wall. Before the inauguration, the NEA had awarded SPARC a new $50,000 grant.

A post shared by Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) (@sparcinla)

“They told us we were selected and we’d be getting all the paperwork. Two weeks ago, they told us it was ‘delayed,'” Baca.

Given the themes of The Great Wall and Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, she wasn’t surprised.

The project also has state funding, but the artist is worried that if FEMA withholds disaster funding, that money could be reallocated.

Baca is also still recovering from fracturing her back—not from any accidents related to mural painting, as likely as the practice is to result in injuries, but from when she sat in a chair that collapsed beneath her at a talk at UCLA in November, just days after the election.

“It was not at all what I needed,” Baca said. “I’m not hurting that much—but mural painters are used to pain!”

Until she can paint again, she is focusing on protecting everyone at SPARC. That includes educating the community about their rights against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and closing off some parts of the SPARC facility to the public, so that there are areas where ICE cannot enter.

And though Baca is undeniably troubled by the actions of the current administration, she is full of hope for the future and about the fight for justice.

“What we’re going to do is what we did before. We did it before. We’ll do it again. And it’s another generation that has to do the work, because those of us who were there the first time are aging,” Baca said. “It’s a pass off of the baton, and we hope this mural is going to be an inspiration.”

The Other Art Fair is on view at 2800 Casitas Avenue, Los Angeles, California, February 20–23, 2025.

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