Art Schools, Universities and Public Art: Educating a New Generation of Artists
How do we prepare emerging artists to work in the public forum? What are the different skills and preparation required of artists who work with and within communities?
Judith Baca
Synopsis by Carrie Hornbeck
Judith Baca opened her presentation speaking candidly about the current state of affairs in California. She likened the recent dispensing with bilingual education to the adversities that sparked civil rights activism in the late sixties. Although California has been known as a place of diversity, Baca contends that recent measures are simply a way to reinforce a long standing "addiction to slavery." Clearly due both to her role as a young activist around 1969 and to her place as a Chicano artist fighting for recognition, Baca was inspired to join the public arts arena with the 1974 founding of Los Angeles's first mural program.
In the site of a flood control channel in the San Fernando Valley, Baca began "The Great Wall of Los Angeles." She envisioned the mural as a opportunity to retell the history of Los Angeles with its diverse ethnicities well represented. To this end, she initially hired eighty 14-21 year olds of different genders, races, ages, and from various gangs. This led organically to the need to feed, shelter and otherwise aid the participants. Also, vitally important was the need to break down stereotypes through education, in order to facilitate working together.
A challenge that Baca had not anticipated was the need to recover history. Where she had expected to find documented historical accounts of the city's diverse ethnic groups, she found none. This meant involving specialized historians in the construction of a time-line of relevant contributions. The log was not limited to a particular type of achievement, but included accomplishments in fields such as music and film.
Against a background of local trepidation, Baca bussed in the eighty youth--all criminal offenders on juvenile detention release. To placate protests by the Valley's inhabitants, she made a promise to bring down the crime rate--a pledge that came to fruition, by Baca's accounts. A motivating factor was the potential to earn: everyone was paid and the pay rate increased over time. New people joined every summer and, as returning laborers' skills were honed, they were rewarded with greater responsibilities. Some advanced as far as the design team.
The young muralists portrayed histories such as "350,000 Mexican Americans Deported," "Farewell to Rosie the Riviter"--depicting Rosie being sucked into a T.V. in a pink suburb--and "Zoot Suit Riots, Los Angeles, 1943." The topics were animated by lecturers hired to speak to the workers about the histories.
From the "Great Wall" model, Baca relocated to a rural farm community to begin the "Guadalupe Mural Project." In one sense this broccoli and artichoke-growing region, which is eighty percent Mexican, had a common link with Los Angeles: the history of many of its people had gone unrecorded. Baca showed us a revealing photograph in which all the documentation to be found regarding the town was hung sparsely on a single wall.
Four portable panels were produced in Guadalupe, portraying the discrimination and dire circumstances encountered by its farm workers. Some concerns the mural addressed were poor housing, inadequate medical care and the use of pesticides.
Most recently, after successful productions on rural and urban scales, Baca turned to the international scene with the "World Wall." She describes this traveling installation addressing issues of world peace as a "vision of a future without fear." Ultimately her hope is that in the production of a world mural, diverse countries--even feuding countries--can "create space for difference."
Analysis by Trina Kyounghui Yi
Judith Baca, a Chicano visual artist, arts activist, community leader, and professor of visual arts, began her presentation by stating a few recent changes that dismissed the work of many activists in California. For example, these changes caused to discontinue bilingual education, revoke immigrant workers' community rights and the demise of affirmation action, thereby virtually undoing much of work she and many others have been involved with in the past.
The city of Los Angeles, known for its diversity and social conflicts, can be described as a contested space. According to Baca, "it stands on its feet but hates its feet." To retort, Baca founded the first mural program which produced over 250 murals and hired over 1,000 participants in its ten years of operation. Many projects involved balancing gender, age and race while trying to work out the differences, as well as investigating and recovering histories of people of color whose achievements have often not been acknowledged.
"The Great Wall" began in 1976 with 80 young people ages between 14 to 21. It created a place where people of different ethnicity, age group and gender can come together with their differences set aside to work as a group--a community. More importantly, this project brought young people from various walks of life: mostly indigenous, many juvenile delinquents, some pregnant and some with other means of being categorized as deviants. Regardless of what the neighbors and police department predicted, Baca's wall reduced the crime rate, created an amicable public environment involving educational process and gave the community pride and public consciousness.
With "The Great Wall," Baca inspired other smaller, but by no means less important, walls throughout the different communities. The continual dialogue established by these various walls allowed different communities to observe, translate and learn as their own languages and memories transformed from indifferences to awakenings. This inspiration didn't stop at the community level. She initiated a project called, "World Wall = World Peace" which is a traveling exhibition. As a mural arrives to a destination, that country adds another mural with a cultural story and sends it off to another country, further adding and extending words of peace at a global level.
What more can an artist do to educate, challenge, promote and evoke changes to the society of dominant white culture than to hear and understand the different voices? Baca shared with the crowd some success stories: how a 14-year-old juvenile pregnant girl and incest survivor rose above and became a director. Another significant demonstration she conducted had to do with diminishing the wall built between the differences by exercising the mirror effect. This exercise involved two people of opposite status standing face-to-face as to mimic the act of looking into the mirror to observe the differences as his/her own. The most effective result according to Baca was that "after ‘The Great Wall,’ all the participants of different ethnicities became one nice brown/red color."
It is quite ironic that she literally builds walls to breakdown the inner walls--lessen the social conflicts, to expand the awareness of others and to demolish the hate which began too long ago.