Judith F. Baca

/in /by
Judy Baca

Judith F. Baca

Professor Emeritus
Emeriti Faculty

Office: 7369 Bunche Hall

Email: judybaca@ucla.edu

Phone: (310) 822-9560

Biography

Judith Francisca Baca, native Angeleno, is a visual artist, an arts activist, a community leader and a professor of visual art.

As a visual artist, Judith Baca is best known for her large-scale public murals. Her art involves extensive community organizing and participation, addressing multi-cultural audiences. In the internationally known GREAT WALL OF LOS ANGELES mural in the Tujunga Wash Flood Control Channel, Baca designed a work which incorporated 40 ethnic scholars, 450 multi-cultural neighborhood youth, 40 assisting artists and over 100 support staff to paint a half mile long mural on the ethnic history of California. Painted over five summers, this exciting work describes decade by decade the contributions and struggles of California’s diverse peoples from prehistoric times to the 1950’s. Unique among murals in its conceptual approach, the GREAT WALL also provided an educational program of training in inter-racial relations for the project’s participants and for the people in the surrounding community.

Education

  • Honorary PhD, Fine Arts, Trustees of CSU and CSU Northridge (2018)
  • MA, Modern Abstract Art, CSU Northridge (1970)
  • BA, Modern Abstract Art, CSU Northridge (1969)

Research

  • Extensive community organizing and participation (including participatory public art projects)
  • Exploration of relationship between land and memory
  • Historical and narrative public practice
  • Initiatives that reflect the lives and concerns of populations that are disenfranchised

Selected Publications

Baca’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, published in numerous periodicals, journals, and books, and documented in several films, such as:

  • Sustaining Sites of Public Memory by Judith F. Baca from Public Art Review
  • Judy Baca: Our People are the Internal Exiles by Diane Neumaier
  • Raising Community Consciousness with Public Art: Contrasting Projects by Judy Baca and Andrew Leicester by Erica Doss
  • Mapping the Terrain by Suzanne Lacy, Chapter by Judy Baca “Whose Monument Where”

And more recently,

  • Baca: Art, Collaboration & Mural Making by Mario Ontiveros
  • Judith F. Baca by Anna Indych-López

Teaching Affiliations

  • Co-founder and Artistic Director at SPARC: Social Public Art Resource Center, Venice, California
  • Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Chicana/o Studies and World Arts and Culture Department, UCLA
  • Professor, Studio Arts Department, UC Irvine
  • Professor, Visual and Public Art department, CSU Monterey Bay