ARTISTS GET IN STEP WITH PEACE MARCH

When the “Great Peace March” begins next month, hikers calling for an end to the threat of nuclear war will bring essentials such as food, water and extra Adidas on their cross-country trek. But the dedicated walkers also will take art on the march.

Large trucks will haul seven 10-by-30-foot “portable murals” on the 255-day trip from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., sponsored by Pro-Peace, an international movement calling for bilateral nuclear disarmament. Local muralist Judith F. Baca and students from her Mural Training Program are producing the large-scale artworks.

“I wanted to help create images that would teach people it’s possible to impact change,” said Baca, co-founder and head of the Social and Public Arts Resource Center in Venice where work in progress on two mural panels can be viewed Saturday through March 15. “Our greatest problem is that people feel the peace movement is hopeless.”

Baca, a 39-year-old Los Angeles native, is the driving force behind the “Great Wall of Los Angeles,” the 2,470-foot-long, 13-foot-high mural along the Tujunga Wash depicting the city’s history. Since 1976, Baca and some 250 teen-agers have been painting the massive work during intermittent summers. Completion is slated for 1987.

“I’m using a process for the Pro-Peace murals I originally developed for the ‘Great Wall,’ ” explained Baca, working collectively with 20 art students, free-lance illustrator Matt Wuerker, artist Jane Boyd and curator Linda Lopez.

Pro-Peace, founded by David Mixner, asked Baca to participate in its cause late last year, she said.

After Pro-Peace supplied her with the theme, “Vision of a Future Without Fear,” Baca said she and Wuerker “came up with a master plan to make each mural panel say something specific. Then we brainstormed with the students and wrote down and sketched out all our design ideas. Next, Matt and I refined the designs.”

What followed, and will continue until all murals are completed, is a similar process involving blueprint production, sketch-to-canvas transfers and final acrylic application done by more advanced students, Baca, Wuerker and Boyd.

“The murals will be a visual imaging of the Pro-Peace concept,” Baca said. “They chronicle how people go about making a peace movement together. Our creative, collective process is paralleling the process of a collective peace effort.”

Though time constraints will prevent completion of all the murals by the peace vigil’s March 1 departure date, Baca’s plan is to place the mural panels in a panorama, 250 feet in circumference, once they all meet up with about 5,000 marchers. The murals will be suspended from tall scaffoldings in 20-acre “urban core” campsites along the way.

“The left side of the circle will show the development of the spiritual side of a peace effort; the right side will show the development of the material or economical world,” said Baca. “It’s a narrative that tracks from the outside panels to the center ‘Balance’ panel where everything is converging on peace.”

Viewed as a whole, all seven panels will represent global and individual efforts to end racism, hatred and violence while fostering cooperation, worldwide interdependence and the peaceful use of technology to feed the hungry or build schools instead of weapons.

“The media image (of a nuclear future) is negative and we have to get the positive images out there so people can begin to shift their own internal images,” said Baca, also a studio art professor at UC Irvine.

“I hope that the murals will demystify the step-by-step process of how to work toward more life-supporting systems. I hope people understand the power of joining with others and see that we can combat the powerlessness and apathy. All these old guys are deciding we’re going to die. . . . Give me a break. Who says they get to decide?”