Whitewashed without Notice, Judy Baca’s Iconic Freeway Mural Is Being Fully Restored
An important piece of Chicana art will return to public view, but that doesn’t fix the city’s lax pu
In April of 2019, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority has admitted it was responsible for the whitewashing of a historic Los Angeles mural, titled “Hitting the Wall,” which was completed in 1984 by muralist and UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture professor ermerita Judy Baca to commemorate the first time women were allowed to run in an Olympic marathon. Now METRO, along with Caltrans, have agreed to support SPARC (Social and Public Art Resource Center)—Baca's resource center—to restore the mural. Baca spoke with Los Angeles Magazine about art, the Olympics, sexism, and the whitewashing of Los Angeles.
"Artist Judy Baca’s murals have defined the landscape of Los Angeles since the 1970s, when she first installed her large-scale works in some of L.A.’s most public places.
Judy Baca's "Hitting the Wall" pictured in 2007 | Brian VanderBrug/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images A lifelong Chicana activist, Baca, 73, grew up in Watts and Pacoima. She participated in the Chicano Moratorium (losing a teaching job over it) and apprenticed as a painter at La Tallera, the mural workshop founded by David Alfaro Siqueiros, one of the founders of the leftist Mexican muralism movement alongside Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. Baca’s work is a profoundly feminist take on Mexican muralism, emphasizing accessibility to the working class.
Baca created a revolutionary public mural program that brought in local kids in underprivileged neighborhoods to paint the murals alongside her. Her best known work is The Great Wall Of Los Angeles, which plastered a stretch of the L.A. River along Coldwater Canyon with a revolutionary timeline of L.A. history, replete with horrific events like the Zoot Suit Riots and Japanese internment camps.
Throughout her career, Baca has struggled against L.A.’s attempts to censor public art depicting realities like racist police violence. She has also fought against the sexist notion that large-scale art is somehow masculine with works like Uprising of the Mujeres, an astonishing expressionist work she did 40 years ago that depicts an indigenous woman— based on Baca’s grandmother—leading workers out of the fields; it was recently purchased by he Smithsonian. Baca is also artistic director of SPARC (Social and Public Art Resource Center) in Venice.
In advance of the 1984 Olympics, Baca was among the muralists commissioned to create works to line L.A.’s freeways. She painted the iconic mural Hitting the Wall, depicting a woman running the marathon (’84 was the first year women were allowed to run), under an overpass on the 110 through downtown L.A. It adorned that wall for 35 years, until early 2019, when it was painted over without notice."— Molly Lambert, Feb. 21, 2020
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Los Angeles Magazine website.
Read more about Judy Baca.
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