Chicana Wields a Mighty Brush to Place Los Angeles Murals on Global Display

“I want to take what I have learned in the neighborhoods of Los Angeles on an international level,” says Judith F. Baca, a leader of the local Chicano mural movement.

Baca’s latest project is the mammoth “World Wall: A Vision of the Future Without Fear,” an evolving, 210-foot portable peace mural that will be seen in eight countries including South Africa, Mexico, Japan and Spain.

The mural--which eventually will feature seven 10-foot-by-30-foot panels by Baca and seven additional 10-foot-by-30-foot panels painted by artists from each country the mural visits--is now halfway completed and has been seen in Finland and the Soviet Union.

It had a three-month stint at Washington’s Smithsonian Institution last summer, and about 3,000 Angelenos had a chance to view it during a weekend showing at Lincoln Park’s Plaza de la Raza in early April. For its next venue, Baca hopes to take it to Santa Barbara in April for Earth Day celebrations.

Baca, 45, painted her first public mural at Hollenbeck Park in 1971 and has since produced such monumental projects as the half-mile long “Great Wall of Los Angeles” mural, which she painted in the last 10 years with hundreds of teen-agers along the Tujunga Wash.

She sees her “World Wall” mural, which is patterned after the “Great Wall,” as a chance to promote the murals of East Los Angeles on a global level. She also hopes it will promote a global understanding of peace.

“In 1969 and ‘70, there were no murals in Los Angeles,” said Baca, who also founded the first citywide mural project, which produced more than 250 Los Angeles murals over a 10-year period, and the more than 3-year-old “Neighborhood Pride: Great Walls Unlimited” program, which has commissioned 36 additional murals thus far.

“The movement started in East Los Angeles with the Hispanic community there, and now we’re definitely the international seat of the mural movement. . . . I think the ‘World Wall’ is going to do the same thing--create the first of a series of global collaborative projects just like the murals of East L.A. set in motion murals springing up around the whole city, the whole country and the world.”

Artist Wayne Healy, a founder of the East Los Streetscapers muralist group, which currently runs the downtown Palmetto Gallery, said Baca’s mural will definitely “help the cause” of other Chicano muralists yearning to do international projects.

Healy and fellow muralist Roberto Delgado hope to arrange for murals to be painted in Spain by members of the newly formed L.A. Latino Mural Collaboration.

John Valadez, a master painter whose previous mural sites include Barcelona, Spain, said that while “Chicano work has been seen (abroad) before, it’s been shown mostly in Spain and France. (Baca) is also going to distant countries that haven’t seen our murals--except maybe just in books.”

Margarita Nieto, a Chicana professor and writer who organized a project in which Los Angeles artist Eloy Torrez painted a mural in France this past summer, noted that although Chicano murals are already “surprisingly well known” in Europe, Baca’s project is still “very important and will certainly open up possibilities (for other muralists).”

Baca began work on the “World Wall” in 1986 with funding from the U.S. Department of Education and organizers of “The Great Peace March.” But when the peace march movement began to fizzle, production on the mural stalled.

Additional funding was later found, however, and production resumed. Baca left for Joensuu, Finland, with 4 1/2 completed panels in the summer of 1990. She then took the project to Moscow’s Gorky Park, where it was seen by an estimated 150,000 people.

Baca said she began her project by asking various people to define peace. “Everyone’s definition was simply the absence of war,” she said. “There was no active definition of peace itself, and no visual set of images that went along with the concept of peace. So we wanted to create those images.”

Baca brought together an international team of 45 students and artists who thought about how to define peace--and came up with the simple definition of “balance.” In the mural’s central panel, Baca illustrates that concept through Hopi- and Eastern-influenced depictions balancing the sun and the moon, the land and the sea, and man and woman.

When all seven of her panels are completed, “Balance” will be flanked on the left by three panels illustrating the spiritual or individual means to achieving peace, and on the right by three panels outlining material and economic means to peace.