A feminist who immersed herself in the Mexican muralist tradition, Judy Baca often works outside of museum spaces. She created the famous mural known as The Great Wall of Los Angeles on location in the Tujunga Wash, a tributary of the Los Angeles River in North Hollywood, in the 1970s and 1980s. Now he’s making a new chapter of The Great Wall in an unlikely space: the Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where visitors can watch Baca and his crew paint sections of a 350-foot panel of fabric stretched across the exhibition hall designed by Renzo Piano.
The idea came after Baca had a group of museum exhibitions in 2022. “Lacma asked me to do an exhibition, and I just said that I’m not interested in putting my work in a white box,” he said. The Journal of Art recently at the museum, as his team colored images of farm worker faces and police helmets in front of a crowd of high school students. “Lacma was enlightened to do this, because we broke all the rules; we entered with paint.”
while The Great Wall covers California’s immigrant-rich history through the 1950s, the new section focuses on the 1960s and 1970s, with scenes from the Farmers’ Movement, the Chicano Movement, and Watts’ cultural renaissance. The section comprises acrylics on a lightweight non-woven fabric called Polytab, and will later be applied to the Tujunga Wash wall.
As for how she would rate Lacma as a studio, she says, “I keep getting interrupted, so I’m not doing as much painting as I’d like, but that’s okay, this is important.” As he told the high school students a few minutes earlier, “This is an important part of American history, a history we need to know.”
