A Judy Baca Moment: ‘My Work Has Been Good for a Long Time’
After 50 years of painting, teaching and social activism, Baca’s career is now being recognized in more conventional settings — museums, with walls, roofs, skylights, electricity, running water and air-conditioning.
"It has never been easy to see a Judith Baca mural. They are scattered around this city, splashes of color and depictions of triumph and trauma hidden alongside highways, alleyways and river banks. And they were even harder to paint. Baca had to overcome fumes from traffic whizzing by on the 110 Freeway (she brought a tank of oxygen for when her legs began feeling heavy), flash floods in the Tujunga Wash, and 112-degree afternoons in the San Fernando Valley.
That is finally changing. After 50 years of painting, teaching and social activism, Baca’s career is now being recognized in more conventional settings — museums, with walls, roofs, skylights, electricity, running water and air-conditioning. There are exhibitions celebrating this Chicana artist at the J. Paul Getty Museum and another set to open at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles, which will use its warehouse space to display her traveling international exhibition, “The World Wall: A Vision of the Future Without Fear.” A Baca retrospective just closed at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.
“It’s amazing,” said Julian Brooks, the senior curator for drawings at the Getty, who is organizing her show there. “She does seem to be the woman of the moment. Judy Baca is everywhere.”
For Baca, it is a long awaited recognition not only for her, but for an art form that has helped define culture in Los Angeles. Murals and the artists who created them were historically ignored by the once overwhelmingly white and male-dominated world of establishment curators and art directors; the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority whitewashed one of her murals in 2019 because it had been tagged by graffiti. At the age of 75, she is pleasantly surprised by the flurry of recognition." — reviewsbym team, July 3, 2022
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the reviewsbym website.
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