Earlier this week, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles announced that it has acquired the archive for The History of California, Judith F. Baca’s epic mural cycle. More commonly known as the Great Wall of Los Angeles, Baca’s mural offers a vision of history from the perspectives of historically marginalized groups, including Indigenous, Latinx, Black, and Asian communities, as well as queer people and women.
“This monumental work by an iconic artist contributes to shaping a more inclusive view of life in the United States and California,” Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the Lucas Museum’s director, said in a statement announcing the acquisition. “This incredible repository uniquely positions the Lucas Museum to illustrate the significance of public murals to storytelling.”
The Lucas Museum’s acquisition of the archive includes more than 350 objects related to the creation of the Great Wall, from concept drawings and mural studies to blueprints and site plans to notes and correspondence. Objects from the archive will could be included in the Lucas Museum’s permanent displays, when it opens in 2023. (Originally slated to open in 2022, the museum has delayed its inauguration after the pandemic forced it to push back its construction schedule.)
[The Lucas Museum wants to change how an art museum can be a part of society.]
Baca first developed the idea for the Great Wall in 1974, and the initial 1,000 feet was completed in 1976, with additions continuing through 1983. Its creation was administered through the muralism-focused arts nonprofit she cofounded, the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). The process for creating the mural’s imagery was collaborative, with Baca working with scholars, historians, and community leaders to research the stories it would tell. Baca then worked with a team of artists and young people, many of whom had been considered at-risk, to produce the work in the Tujunga Wash.
For Baca, the Great Wall was a way to artistically imagine various moments in U.S. history that she found to be under-known and glaringly missing from history textbooks. This, she realized, could be a way for people from these marginalized groups to learn about their own histories, from their struggles to their triumphs. Her mural begins with images of prehistoric animals who roamed the land, moves on to California’s earliest people the Chumash, images colonization from the perspective of Indigenous people, and extends to the 1950s, with scenes depicting the Great Depression, the deportation of 500,000 Mexican Americans, the Zoot Suit Riots, Japanese internment, and protests against racially restrictive housing covenants also included.
[Read about how Judith F. Baca created the Great Wall.]
Currently 2,700 feet long, the Great Wall will soon get an update, thanks to a $5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation that will allow Baca and her team to extend the mural’s imagery from the 1960s to the present and make it a full mile long. “It’s going to put those historical moments in the context of the time we’re living in—an interpretation of history from 2020 and 2021,” Baca told ARTnews earlier this year.
Below, a look at some of the preparatory sketches for the Great Wall that are now part of the Lucas Museum’s collection.
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Image Credit: Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles. © 1980 Judith F. Baca/Image courtesy of the SPARC Archives (SPARCinLA.org) Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles 1950: Farewell to Rosie the Riveter: Final Coloration, Punto Perspective, 1983.
The 1950s section of the Great Wall opens with this iconic image depicting the struggles women faced during the postwar era. In her monograph on Baca, art historian Anna Indych-López writes, “Rosie the Riveter, symbol of the women who left behind their traditional roles as housewives to perform industrial jobs during World War II, resists her return to the domestic sphere, a process made graphic by a television image of a woman with a vacuum cleaner who attempts to suck Rosie back into the simulacra home.”
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Image Credit: Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles. © 1980 Judith F. Baca/Image courtesy of the SPARC Archives (SPARCinLA.org) Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles 1950: The Development of Suburbia, 1983.
Abutting the Rosie the Riveter scene is one that shows the development of L.A.’s suburbs, in particular those in the San Fernando Valley, “reflecting the contentious history of white flight,” according to Indych-López. SPARC’s website expands on this: “Behind the televised images of American womanhood, an all‑American family of 2.5 kids (.5 equaling ‘Howdy Doody’) moves into a new suburb of endless box houses in endless rows, representing White flight from the Central City. Meanwhile, minorities and poor immigrants move from rural communities into the city. Rows of orange trees have been uprooted as suburbs sprawl throughout the L.A. basin and valleys.”
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Image Credit: Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles. © 1980 Judith F. Baca/Image courtesy of the SPARC Archives (SPARCinLA.org) Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles 1950: Chavez Ravine and the Division of the Barrios, 2017.
One of the main focuses of the Great Wall is the experience of Latinx and Chicanx people in Los Angeles. During the development of L.A.’s freeways systems and Dodger’s Stadium, a number of the freeway interchanges were sited in the city’s East Side, which has historically been the heart of the city’s Latinx population. As a result, neighborhoods were divided by the freeways, effectively displacing the communities that had long called the area home. Similarly, Dodger’s Stadium is located on the site of Chavez Ravine, once a thriving Latinx community, that was cleared—in some cases through police violence—to build the baseball stadium, depicted here as a UFO dropping down into the city.
Indych-López writes, “Baca cleverly animates the freeway which encircles and divide up a Chicana/o family while its pylons crush their houses, creating a visual metaphor for the ways in which the freeway represents a force of destruction.”
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Image Credit: Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles. © 1980 Judith F. Baca/Image courtesy of the SPARC Archives (SPARCinLA.org) Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles 1950: Indian Assimilation, 1983.
Beginning in the 19th century, generations of Native Americans and Indigenous peoples in the United States (as well as ones in Canada) were forced to attend residential and boarding schools, where children were separated from their families and community elders. There, these children were instructed in Christianity and Western education models, forbidden to speak the mother languages or practice their tribal rituals, and were often subjected to physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. All of this was done as a way to assimilate Indigenous peoples to white U.S. culture. The devasting effects of these forced assimilation practices are still felt in Indigenous communities across the continent today.
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Image Credit: Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles. © 1980 Judith F. Baca/Image courtesy of the SPARC Archives (SPARCinLA.org) Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles 1950: Asians Gain Citizenship and Property: First Korean to Be Granted American Citizenship, 1983.
The United States has a long history of anti-Asian racism, beginning with the 1875 Page Act, which barred Chinese women from immigrating to the United States. Later, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited the immigration of all Chinese people to the United States. Waves of Chinese immigration had begun decades earlier with the California Gold Rush and lasted through the construction of the transcontinental railroads. The Chinese Exclusion Act wasn’t repealed until 1943, with new laws that set strict quotas for the number of immigrants allowed into the United States each year. During World War II, Japanese Americans across the Western states were interned in concentration camps, at the same time that the 442nd Infantry Regiment, consisting of Japanese Americans, became the most decorated military unit in U.S. history. These stories are all depicted at various points in the Great Wall, and Baca also included a scene depicting a Korean person being naturalized as an American citizen.
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Image Credit: Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles. © 1980 Judith F. Baca/Image courtesy of the SPARC Archives (SPARCinLA.org) Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles 1950: The Birth of Rock and Roll, 1983.
One of the mural’s lighter moments comes in this scene, in which Elvis Presley jams on a guitar in a movie seen by a group of people in American muscle cars at a drive-in. Behind Elvis is a portrait of Chuck Berry, and to his left are saxophonist Charlie Parker and singer Big Mama Thornton, whom Baca includes as an acknowledgment of the ways in which Black culture indelibly influenced the development of rock ’n’ roll.