Judy Baca at the Museum of Latin American Art

Judith F. Baca, Tres Generaciones (Three Generations) (1973). Self-portrait of the artist with mother and grandmother. Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 feet. Collection of the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Latin American Art.

Judy Baca’s career-spanning retrospective at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach, Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, celebrates the Chicana artist and educator for her formal experiments as well as for her unparalleled community-based practice. The show’s title, which translates as “The Memories of Our Land,” gives an apt sense of Baca’s focus: As a self-described “political landscape painter,” she has spent over 50 years engaging the land as an index of marginalized histories and collective possibilities. Working alongside urban planners, neighborhood kids, fellow artists, and others, Baca brings a pointed political consciousness to public art, drawing on the activism of the Chicana/o art movement and asking pressing questions about how artists and institutions might promote social change.

While Baca is best known as a muralist, painting has remained central to her practice—a means to explore her personal history and political convictions on a more intimate scale. The first of MOLAA’s galleries begins with a cluster of drawings and paintings, including a dreamy, Van Gogh-like rendering of the artist, her mother, and her grandmother, titled Tres Generaciones (Three Generations) (1973), early cross-hatched figurative sketches, and an expressive pandemic-era portrait. Later, in the intensely colorful double-sided tryptic Matriarchal Mural: When God Was a Woman—begun in 1980 and completed in 2021 for this show—nude female figures merge with the landscape (magma flows on one side of the panels and tree roots on the other), evoking an intimate relation to the land and a matriarchal view of nature. Las Tres Forever (2021) reimagines her 1976 work, Las Tres Marías, and features a mirror flanked by life-size colored pencil portraits of the artist in period attire, dressed as a 1970s “chola” and a 1940s “pachuca.” The cool-toned yet incisive piece both links Baca with successive generations of Chicanxs and compels viewers to look in the mirror and consider their relationship to this legacy.

If the show grounds Baca’s work in the personal, the next gallery addresses her expansive public art practice, offering a fascinating breadth of preparatory materials, documentation, scale models, and finished pieces. Public art can be difficult to present in museum contexts, but the emphasis here on process as well as product demonstrates the logistical and institutional demands of each work. Particularly compelling is the annotated mock-up for La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra (1996), a mural commissioned by USC and then nearly decommissioned for being “too negative” and “depressing” a depiction of racialized violence in early California. Written in the margins of the scaled drawing, the annotations recount a heated exchange between Baca and then USC president Steven Sample over historical truth and institutional accountability, in which Baca defends the necessity of her accurate, and often suppressed, historical narrative.

Elsewhere, viewers encounter photos and models for The World Wall: A Vision of the Future Without Fear (1986–2006), a globe-spanning mural project organized through Baca’s nonprofit, the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), that features portable panels by Baca and international artists that depict their hopes for a more just future. Forming a massive arc when installed together, the mural negotiates nation-based perspectives—from Israel and Palestine, Russia, and elsewhere—with an overarching, utopian vision of world peace. The colorful documentation on display highlights this sense of commonality and difference, as well as the far-sighted optimism underpinning the ambitious work. If the fields of participatory art and relational aesthetics at times enchant the art world and warrant critique for their narrow views of space, place, and community, Baca’s projects amplify and challenge the deep-seated power dynamics of public space.

The exhibition culminates with an immersive, room-size digital projection of Baca’s celebrated half-mile mural, The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1975–1983), produced on the concrete walls of the Tujunga Wash tributary in North Hollywood with a team of historians, ethnologists, artists, and hundreds of local teenagers, among other collaborators. The mural tells the history of California from the viewpoint of marginalized groups, and conveys the many stories of oppression and resilience sedimented in “our land.” The installation resonates even as it points elsewhere—to the mural’s actual site, 40 miles north, and to the stories of the region that cannot be recovered. Across such gaps, Baca engages the past, present, and future of an always politicized landscape.

Judy Baca: Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, a Retrospective runs from July 14, 2021–March 27, 2022 at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) (628 Alamitos Ave., Long Beach, CA 90802).

Judith F. Baca, La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra, California (1996). Final rismacolor coloration on paper, 25 x 46 inches. Collection of the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Latin American Art.

Judith F. Baca, Matriarchal Mural: When God Was A Woman (1980–2021). Double-sided triptych, side 2: The Birth of the Vision of the Heart. Acrylic on wood panels, 8 x 12 feet. Painting assistance from Martha Ramírez-Oropeza and Gina León (2021); Julie Ruelas, Yreina Cervantes, and 10 additional women (1980s). MOLAA Permanent Collection. Museum purchase with MOLAA Acquisition Funds and funds provided by the Lynne Okon Scholnick Fund. Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Latin American Art.

Judith F. Baca, Pancho Trinity 2 (El Espiritu, La Tierra, and La Familia) (1993). Acrylic paint and mixed media on three urethane-coated styrofoam sculptures, each 26 x 18 x 20 inches. Collection of the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Latin American Art.

Judith F. Baca, Las Tres Forever (installation view) (2021). Mixed media, 72 x 70 x 2 inches. Collection of the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Latin American Art. Photo: Simone Moffatt.

Judy Baca: Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, a Retrospective (installation view) (2021–22). Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Latin American Art. Photo: Simone Moffatt.

Judy Baca: Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, a Retrospective (installation view) (2021–22). Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Latin American Art. Photo: Simone Moffatt.

Judy Baca: Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, a Retrospective (installation view) (2021–22). Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Latin American Art. Photo: Simone Moffatt.

Nick Earhart is a writer and researcher focused on art, ecology, and urban space. He is a PhD candidate in English and Visual Studies at USC, and his dissertation looks at the relationship between art and activism along the Los Angeles River since the 1970s. His scholarly and creative work can be found in numerous publications, including ISLE, GeoHumanities, and Puerto del Sol. He lives in Pasadena.

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