Get Used to It: Ep. 124, "Voices of Our Lives: Judy Baca"

(typewriter typing) (upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Sheila Kuehl, welcome to "Get Used To It." As you know, "Get Used To It" devotes itself to bringing information about people in the gay and lesbian community, or issues in that community. But of course not only for that community. And today we have a real treat. What you were looking at under the credits, is the Great Wall of Los Angeles, a set of murals. And we're going to talk to the artist, director, the founder of the organization that helped put this together. A woman with a long history in art and history in Los Angeles. She is an artist herself. She is the founder of SPARC, which she'll tell you what it stands for because she just told me, and of course it's Social and Political Art Resource Center. - [Judy] Right. - In Los Angeles. She's also a professor at UCLA, Judith Baca, welcome. - [Judith] Thank you, nice to be here. - I'm really happy that you're here. - Thank you. - You know, one of the things that people are always interested in, is kind of how do people begin getting interested in the things that then shape their lives? So tell me a little bit about your family, your background, your growing up, your relatives, caregivers, whatever. How do you start? - Well, it's hard to tell, you know, I mean, it's really hard to tell what was the moment that made me the artist, but I can tell you that my grandparents, Theodore and Franciscan Baca, came in the first wave of the migrations from Mexico during the Mexican revolution, through what we call the Ellis Island of the southwest, El Paso. And they went north on the Santa Fe Trail, it's hundreds of thousands, ever other people did at that time. And they ended up in a little town facing Kansas, at the base of the Purgatoire River, in the freezing cold called La Junta, the junction, where my grandfather was, he was going north toward the Luisa Maria Baca Land Grant, which in my research, I have not quite established our connection to, (Sheila laughs) but when I do it'll mean that we own Denver. - Wouldn't that be nice? That would be terrific. - And they settled there because my great-grandfather was already there. And that family, this whole family, my mother was born in La Junta, Colorado, this tiny little town, which was a very segregated town, a very rough place, very cold. And my grandfather went to work for the railroad. In Mexico, he owned a ranch and a commissary, they called it a commissary, in Pancho Villa, wanted his commissary, and he wanted his roots to the north, so he could bring equipment and materials, and food products for the revolution. And my grandfather didn't believe in war. So I think somewhere in that is the roots of my own activism. And also they were a musical family. So there was lots of talk about, you know, people, the whole family having a piano around the wood burning stove. And my uncles all played in the local bands. They actually had their own band, and they went from town to town playing. And so, I think there was a musical group, and my mother tells stories about how on the side of the stove, in this little house with no electricity, and no running water, my uncle would draw beautiful drawings of gorgeous figurations of Indians, and, you know, sort of miss theso characters with white chalk on the black stove. So I think actually there's probably artists looking back there. - I think there's a gene in there somewhere, maybe. - [Judith] I think so. - Well, I really think that could be the case 'cause although I'm really a nurture over nature kind of person still, sometimes there's just some talent in there, and you certainly have such a great deal of talent. There had to be something in there. - I think maybe it transfers from being musicians to being visual artists, but we came from a family of singers, of performers, and very likely that in our family gathering, somebody was performing. - And where did you grow up? - My mother brought us all, brought the Baca's to California right after the war, right toward the end of the war. Her brothers had been enlisted into the World War II and she was left trying to find a job, and to deal with the family there. And it was hard for her to get a job in this region, and for her to get a job that was well paying and so forth. So she came to California at 18, which I really think actually was the beginning of feminism, right? The idea of a Latina Chicano leaving her family and going to California, so far away by herself was outrageous. It's not something she would've let me do at 18, right? (Sheila laughs) - [Sheila] Alright. - And she came to work in Los Angeles, and that's where I was born. I was born in south central Los Angeles. And my first memories were at 85th in central in what is now known as Watts. And at that time it was a Black and Latino community also. - So growing up, going to school in LA, were you, did you know you were an artist? I mean, so a lot of times kids who are taken with the arts, are really sort of the outsiders in their school. They either are proud of the art, or they just are. And sometimes it's difficult to find your way as an artist in school. - I've met a few of these kinds of children, the children that I was. And now as an art teacher, as a person who actually supports the development of other artists, I can see myself in some of them. I was a straight arrow, from the arts, from the very beginning. It was the passion and the love. I just loved being able to spend hours by myself, making drawings and paintings. And when we left south central and I was living with my mother and my grandmother and my aunt Delia, who was educatedably handicapped, and was about five years old in her development. So she was sort of a giant playmate. My aunt, who was a Ranchera singer, always had this gorgeous voice and was always singing and a glamorous girl. And, my mother who worked in the Goodyear Tire Factory. My mother met a man, fell in love and married an Italian, and we moved to the San Fernando Valley, and that was gonna make us upwardly mobile. - [Sheila] Of course. - And it was Suburbia, and there I entered school. And actually we ended up in a place called Pacoima. I think they made a little bit of a mistake, (Sheila laughs) but the truth was that at that time, the red lining, the districts were determined about where people would live and the covenant laws were still in place. So they ended up in a Black and Latino community, which was how properties were transferred. And it wasn't until I did the research for the Great Wall that I understood why the Laurel Canyon for example, was a dividing line between the two communities. And in Pacoima, I went to Haddon Avenue Elementary School, today it's 99% Spanish speaking children, at that time, Spanish was not allowed on the school grounds. - Right. - So I was having a language transfer in the home and in school. And I think it made me a kind of silent child. And in school I had the great fortune of having a kindergarten teacher, and a principal who I still remember very well, Mrs. Burton. And they named part of the school after her, who I recited Humpty Dumpty in English to, so that I could get into school. (Sheila laughs) She said, "does she speak English?" And my mother said, set me up on the counter. And I said, Humpty Dumpty, sat on the wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. - It's an interesting choice actually, when you think about it. (Judith laughs) And all the king sources. - It is really. - And all the Kings ran, they couldn't put Humpty back together again. - Right, and so I got into school, and I had this wonderful teacher who let me paint, and I still have vivid memories of the shiny tin cans with temper paint and the beautiful newsprint that I could paint on. And my mother kept those paintings. I think they probably did little flakes, (Sheila laughs) but they were good. I mean, they were interesting. Everybody thought they were interesting paintings, and I could have been content painting forever. And I actually, I think about elementary school, the moments of those sort of important art projects in which a teacher decided that for example, we were gonna learn about Holstein cows, and I got to make a cow (Sheila laughs) and paint one, you know, or the Boston Tea Party in which we made a mural. And so, I sort of marked the time- - Your first mural? - [Judith] I did my first mural in elementary school. (Sheila and Judith laughs) - Wow! - [Judith] I think of that when I work with children now, I think, you know, I have no idea of the importance of this. - Well it seems to me, that's one of the great losses, where at least in, you know, in our schools in California, we don't have art and music really as a standard thing in the public schools anymore. And I, you know, I mean, everybody kind of remembers, I took one art class when I was in college, and I actually still have the drawing that I made because I thought you. - You could feel, they're precious. - Gee, I like this. (Sheila laughs) - It's precious. - I like this, and I did it. - You know, I think we all know. I mean, those of us who have done any kind of education and have any education in how people learn, we know that people learn in different ways. And for example, the example of children who were visual learners as I was. I mean, even when I was in college, I was a character that not only read the book, but in a sense, visualized the pages, so that when I was sitting down to do a test, I was rereading what I had taken pictures of in my head. And we know also that other children understand by virtue of creating a movement and then remembering 'cause of the movement, and they're more kinetic. We know that other children are much more verbal and they come through languages. How they hear that, but I was a child that from the very beginning, understood everything through sight. - Well, it's interesting because you can have a, you know, a pentient for expressing yourself in the plastic arts, but that still means that you have to have something to say, and I think what's characterized your work. It's not just, all art is a personal expression, but yours has been so much more, more about social activism and social justice. Where do you think that came from? - Well, that's easier to trace. - [Sheila] Yeah? - I think, it's a combination of both my grandmother and my mother. My grandmother was a person who practiced healing and she did it through prayer, she was a very religious woman who looked like a very indigenous person. I mean, she really looked like an Apache, long braids, and I remember walking down the street with her in the San Fernando Valley, with her carrying a parasol, and that we were really quite a sight. I mean, (Sheila laughs) people were thinking we just stepped off the reservation or something. And not may be, 'cause I was always fair, and light skinned and greenish eyes. And, but Franciscan used herbal medicine. She grew exactly what we needed for the teas and for, you know, compounds that would like take swelling out. I mean, you could always go to Franciscan, and she had a remedy, and she would know exactly which remedy to use. And other people depended on her, and she could see. I remember the first thing in the morning, every morning was her telling us about her dreams. I loved hearing about her dreams, but then I sort of came to dread them, because sometimes the dreams had a determination of what I could do or not do, right? I dreamt that you would fall, and therefore you can't go. (Sheila and Judy laughing) - I see. - So there was a controlling thing. But I think actually the notion of like, living in two realms, the realm of the real, and the unreal or the subconscious and the conscious was what I learned from her. And that also beginning to see how people felt and hearing and learning kind of empathic listening. I learned from my grandmother. And my mother, because of her experiences in a segregated city and little town in Colorado, that was quite brutal in terms of a segregation in the schools. You know, Mexicans couldn't go into certain stores, couldn't ride on the buses except in the back. It's very much like the deep south. I finally had the great experience of taking my mother to the theater that she couldn't sit anywhere, but the balcony in her little town, her hometown, when I did the piece for Denver, I did a piece for Denver International Airport that tells the story of my family's migration. - [Sheila] Huh. - And it's a 50 foot piece in the Denver International Airport. - [Sheila] How wonderful! - And at the same time, we went back to reclaim my grandfather's grave, which had been allowed to go to seed, because all of the graveyard was maintained except for the Mexican graves. - Right. - And my mother went back at high school reunion, and began this process of the reclamation of her father's grave, and was outraged. But it would be Audencia that would be outraged. It would be her that would say, "this is not right." And she would report to the federal authorities about the fact that Mexicans couldn't, soldiers, for example, once they were enlisted in the military, then the federal government became interested in the fact that they were segregated in certain restaurants and in certain facilities. And in fact, it happened here. I remember Roy Ball telling me this amazing story around the time of his retirement. And he was a City Councilman. And he came back from World War II, and a veteran. And they set a veteran's office out in front of City Hall in Los Angeles, and the veterans could come and claim their $500 and the right to buy a house. In other words, they could get a $500 down payment for a house. - Mm. - And when he went to get it, they said to him, "oh, I'm sorry, we don't give it to Mexicans." - [Sheila] Wow! - And he said to the woman who was sitting at the counter, "come over here." And he pointed out the window and he said, "see that car down there?" And it had an E license place in it. He said, "that's my car, I'm Councilman Roy Ball." And interestingly enough, his family is from the same little place that my grandfather bought property. The only place they could buy property across the tracks, along the Arkansas River in a place called La Junta. - And his daughter is now a member of Congress? - [Judith] That's right. So, you know, there's relatives in that my mother's best friend was a rebel. - [Sheila] But to some extent, it does say to you, I mean, one of the interesting things too, is the theme that you chose. And I wanna talk about the Great Wall because of the young people that it involved, and how that came about, but just the theme of history and the theme of inclusion, in a way it's a very American thing. - It is. - You know, when you look at all of our families, and like they say, "we came here on different ships, but we're in the same boat now." - [Judith] Right. - Because a lot of the stories are very similar of exclusion. And, you know, in older times, before your family migrated here, when other white European families came- - [Judith] Watch out the Irish hierarchy. - There was still a hierarchy. - Yes. - You know, I mean, the Irish were here, the Italians were here, the Jews of course were here, and it's always been a kind of a hierarchy, and yet, people somehow, you know, we permeate through to each other and somehow permeate out, and then there's always a new immigrant class that you turn around and say, there was a John Steinbeck's last book was called, "America and the Americans," and also had some wonderful photographs in it. And he wrote that he bet that the first guy that jumped off the Mayflower onto Plymouth Rock, turned around and said, "okay, this is my country, the rest of you foreigners (Judith laughs) go back home." (Judith laughs) (Sheila laughs) - I think that's exactly it. I think there's such an incredible, I think perhaps my fascination with history begins with the fact that we, as Americans have the shortest memories. Maybe because our country is so young, maybe because we have no respect for anything that came before us, that history begins when we walk in the door, and it ends with us. - Right. - And that's how I got really interested in this concept, which I think also is a very indigenous concept. Maybe one that I learned from my grandmother, one I learned from my own roots, which has to do with the fact that almost everyone in the world, whatever culture they're from, believes somehow that memory is embedded in place. And that if you can learn to listen, if you can put your ear to the ground, somehow you begin to have the capacity to see. You can experience something of that moment, the moment of history that occurred in the place. And that's why we take these pilgrimages. That's why we go to places, and for example, go to Gettysburg, and to have the sense of what happened during the civil war. So I actually, I think my work has been about memory, the memory of the land, and of the people. And in a sense, because I am from Los Angeles. So, I'm Angelito, so deeply ingrained one of the few, I think in our city, we seem to be a disappearing group, but, and I grew up alongside of the river. I mean, I watch the rivers be concreted as a child. And a sense the disappearance of the river was like the hardening of the arteries of the land. And in the sense that the nutrients that were carried through those arteries, that sort of went back into the aquifer, and the movement of, or the people who lived along the river were very easy to disappear thereafter. In other words, you disappear the river first, and then you disappear the stories of the people. And so, as I started to excavate the stories of the people of Los Angeles, it was a fascinating story. And one that just became an endless narrative. Of course I had no idea. (Sheila laughs) (indistinct) say in 1976, that it would be over half of my life that I would be working with hundreds of young people, some 14 through 21 year old kids, over 400 of them to paint this narrative, that's a half a mile long now. - Well, let's go back just a little bit. I know, you know, high school, college doing art, how did SPARC start? - [Judith] Had SPARC, got SPARCed? - How did SPARC get SPARCed? 'Cause that's really been the way. - The center. - [Sheila] The center of this activity, and the center really of your social activism, art connection and the community. - Yes, absolutely. In about 1974, I was working for the city. I was a city employee and I became an artist that worked in the parks on what was, one of the great work projects called the CIDA Program. - Right? - Which actually I think very fondly of because. - And a lot of people do, it really funded a lot of people to do very good work. - Terrific stuff. You know, in a sense, it was like the contemporary 1970s WPA. - right? - It had the works progress administration ethic, the notion that you could put people to work at plumber's wages, that they could actually do improvements in their communities. So I was one of those wonderful CIDA artists. We were considered to be citizens, and we were considered to have value in a society. Very novel idea at this moment in time. - For artists, that's true. - Yes. Today artists are really sort of the anathema to the country and to government in general. And I think that's really a mistake, but I was sent out to teach in the parks, and I began teaching at multiple parks across the city. And I very quickly learned that I could travel between the parks, but the young people that I taught could not. And that was a shocking experience, even though I was from Pacoima, I came from a neighborhood that had tremendous amount of struggle between African American and Latino. I was in the east side and I had never seen, or really understood the degree to which neighborhoods were divided. And it was at the same time of the civil rights movement. Cesar Travis was calling for the great boycots. We were trying to be brown and proud. We were trying to be people, women were trying to speak for their rights, and all of this activism was happening. And I wanted to do something about this, but I was only an artist. Right? I had been trained in minimalist painting, I had learned to work with formal dialogues that basically didn't include anybody, but five of my friends who could understand it. And I couldn't understand how I could be a relevant person, if I didn't somehow make the art that would speak to Franciscan and Audencia and to my communities. And I wanted to make art that mattered to them. And so I systematically, after my graduation from the California State University at Northridge to unlearn what I had learned, and to say, how do I make this work? And when I started to do this, others started to do it too. And we needed a place to go. And so I joined forces with two other friends, two wonderful women who are still my dearest friends now, over 30 years, Christina Lesinger and Donna Deech. - Donna Deech, who directed "Desert Hearts?" - She directed "Desert Hearts," and she received her first pennies for, you know, from a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, we wrote at SPARC to make that movie. - And you were partners for a while? - Yes. - For a goodly while. - For a number of years, actually. - Yeah. - And when we founded the SPARC, we were, and Christina was our collaborator in this, and she was my best friend. And still, as I count among the closest family members I have, and she was Arthur's Lessinger's daughter. - [Sheila] Huh. - And she is a wonderful artist, but so we were painters, two painters and a filmmaker. And we were looking for a way somehow to find a home for women who were making art, because it was still a males world. I was working in monumental art forms, in terms of giant scale mural painting. And it was just completely unheard of that a woman would lead that kind of enterprise. Monuments were for men, you know, (Sheila laughs) and men would determine those monuments, and we would be depicted as Muses in them, if at all, right? - Yes, of course. - Right. (Sheila laughs) And I was completely different idea about that. And also Donna was trying to make this revolutionary film. She had finished a film called "Woman to Woman," which was a film about a documentary, which she called, "About Whores, Housewives, and other Mothers." (Sheila laughs) And I had met Donna with her, calling me up and saying, "I wanna shoot you, how can I make a film, will you be in my film, "About Whores, Housewives and Other Mothers?" (Sheila laughs) And I said, okay, I guess I must be another mother. (Sheila laughs) - Which one am I exactly? (Judith laughs) - Which am I? And I was just coming out of being a housewife actually. So I, she came out to the east side and she photographed, she filmed me in front of Mia Violeta, which was a mural that was dedicated to my grandmother, in Hollenbeck Park, was the first piece I did in early seventies. - [Sheila] Ah. - And so I was in that film, and that's how we became great friends for many years and really connected so deeply. But what happened was that we made a space for ourselves, and then what we found was that we were making a space for many other people. And the impetus of SPARC, which still continues to this day was work that was for the working people, the poor. And, in other words, we thought art should be for everyone. It should not just be for those people who could afford it. It should not just be for the upper classes. I didn't wanna become an entertainment for people who were just wealthy and who could afford to have very esoteric works by me. And so I started thinking about how would my father, my stepfather, who was a factory worker, look at this image and if it passed his eyes, and he could understand it, then I was on the mark. And then I tried to get another layer of sophistication, but I was really looking for a layer of information, making in a sense modern day cathedrals. The Great Wall in a sense is a modern day cathedral in which we are teaching people through the imagery, and that it belongs to the people, and therefore, really to know one. - Well, but also public art. - It's public art. - It's so different, you don't really, of course you have to go and see it. Although murals are quite different, they tend to pop up in your consciousness. As you go through something, you know, you'll go through a tunnel, there'll be a mural in it or under a bridge or see something on the side of a store. I have two friends who are artists in Monterey, and they were quite poor for a while and they essentially paid their way for their daughters. You know, what she needed in school and her classmates too, or food or anything by doing a mural on the side of the market to do mural, and ended up. - And it shadeded, the mural. - The murals in the aquarium, which was sort of the, a move up, you know, but still, (Judith laughs) it was a very interesting life for them. And very public because now people say, "oh, 'cause everybody can still see them." And it seems to me to be a very lasting, enormously important kind of public affirmation, especially a mural, as long as the Great Wall, you know? - [Judith] Yes. - But how did the kids get involved? I mean, they were not necessarily brought to SPARC, right? - Well, no, there was always children's program and adolescents. I mean, I had a sort of pension for working with adolescents. I think it was like, in a sense sort of staying 12 or 13 myself, probably help. I really can relate to adolescences. I really relate to their character. I have a harder time with little children, although I've come to appreciate them more. (Sheila laughs) I started out a high school teacher. And when I was teaching in the parks, I saw the city of Los Angeles, preparing programs for preschool, and elementary and then seniors, and just skipping the adolescence because they were so problematic because there was particularly in the east side, there was all these layers of gang warfare, and difficult adolescence, and in a sense, we were already writing off adolescent kids. And what I really found in the parks that I worked at, and I spent over five years organizing in the neighborhoods of east Los Angeles, and creating the first mural teams out there. I hired the kids, I got them on programs for, it was very hard to convince people that, these were really jobs that kids needed, or they were worth paying the kids for, but to give them a job in which they were cleaning up their neighborhood, in which they were making something beautiful that spoke to their experiences, that actually talked about what they cared about, that spoke from the voice of the community, was a really important act. It was a very empowering act for young people, and a really educative process. So I became involved in creating treaties between neighborhood groups, creating some of the first groups. My first group was called Las Vistas Nuevas, or the new view group. And they were all kids from four different gang groups that were from the parks I was teaching at, that I brought together with agreements that we would work together. And we painted Mia Violeta, and we painted Hollenbeck Park. We painted a Castella Recreation Center, next to Estrada Courts, which then started the Estrada Courts projects. And we actually had an enormous impact in those early, we were in the front page of the LA Times, and people were saying, "oh, gang members put down knives for brushes." And it was all sort of sensational. People just couldn't understand, how this young woman was out there working with these gang kids. And it wasn't any big thing really. What it was simply, was a respectful treatment of young minds, understanding that many of them were talented, giving them the jobs they needed, and the opportunity to do something positive, and not any great alchemy, not anything terribly miraculous, just a little hopeful treatment, and good will, and desire. And it worked. And that's how the Great Wall began, because they're always, when I had the opportunity at the Great Wall in 1974, the Army Corps of Engineers was looking at all of these concrete riverbeds, and saying, "o, o, now we needed aesthetic planning division because we've created eye sores throughout the city, we have dirt belts." And we've divided communities. And you know, there's no more native vegetation and let's design a park and would you help us? By that time? I was the director of the first city's Mural Program. And I had gone to the City Council and, you know, asked them to help me do more murals on the east side and not even knowing what I was doing in the City Council. Somebody had to tell me when the vote happened, that I had won. (Sheila laughs) - It was confusing sometimes, no question. - And I had actually convinced the City Council to fund the first city of Los Angeles Mural Program. And I was then directing murals all over the city. But what I saw was that we needed one place within the city in which we could bring different neighborhood groups, in which we had one idea, which was that connection between us. And so this long wall in the flood control channel, to me was perfect because it was like creating a tattoo on the scar where the river once ran. And that mean, we were like creating a narrative that went down this long, endless wall. And it gave children an opportunity to see their story in relationship to another story, in relationship to another story, and to teach them African Americans, Latinos, young girls, gay kids, straight kids, that this story was all of our stories. And that together, this really was what America was about. - You know, I've always been curious and I imagine people watching are curious too. How does a mural get put together? I mean, people don't go and say, gee, I think I'll paint something on this place, right? I mean, there's preparation, panels, there's a drawing somewhere? How, how does a mural get put together? - Well, it's a massive amount of preparation. In my process, and many artists do their works in different ways, but the process that has become SPARCs process, the one that I have been working in for all these years now, over 30, is a process in which we begin with academic research. So we're doing very serious research. - So the theme of it, the images of it, the story. - We're studying something, we're studying the environment or we're studying the history of California, or of the United States. And we're digging up things. But for example, the Fair Employment Laws of the FTR area, Franklin Roosevelt's Fair Employment Practices, laws, well, that doesn't mean anything, except it's text. Until you see it's manifestation in the world, that actually opened up, in World War II, it opened up the aircraft industry to black women and to Latinos, and that changed dramatically their status within a society and their employability. - [Sheila] Right? - Because up to that point, you could say, "Ebony black person needed for restroom tending," right? - [Sheila] Right, right. - And before that, when that law basically made that illegal, and it made it possible for people to gain employment in these places. So the next layer after academic research, is lived experience, tell us about that experience, were you there? - So did somebody interview people? Do you take notes? - [Judith] We videotape. - Did the kids do this process? - Yes, that's right. The kids work on that process, design teams run. - [Sheila] So they interview people and get the stories? - Yes. - [Sheila] That go with the history? - Right, so like, you know, for example, somebody from the fighting for 42nd, says, "I was recruited out of an internment camp," and this person will say, "we were the fabric of America." And he's just given us a magnificent metaphor about the Japanese fighting for 42nd becoming the stripes of the American flag. - Right. - And say, "you're the most decorated infantry group in World War II." - [Sheila] Right. - So we're looking at the story, we're hearing people's lived experience. They weren't collecting metaphors. We talked to writers, we talked to poets, Hollywood 10 stood for 10 more, and 10 more, and 10 more. So then we can see it. It starts to be an image. And then there are many, many sketches and drawings, and those drawings are refined, and then finally they become what they call a maquette, which is a scale model. - Scale model, but a flap of painting? - Sometimes we make 'em three dimensionally, and then we create those to scale into blueprints, and then the blueprints are taken to the wall and transferred in giant grids. - Huh? - So we're teaching math. - So then what you have at the wall, you have, I'm sorry, I didn't mean- - We're teaching math in the process too. - So then you have an outline. - [Judith] Mm. - Is that right? - Right. - That is filled in, and is it filled in, is there creativity at the wall itself? - There's never an image art, placed on the wall at the moment, we are on the wall that's new. In other words, any mistake costs too much money. - Right. - So in other words, imagine that you put something in purple, and you decide not to do that. Well, that could be a $200 mistake. - [Sheila] Right? - So you don't do that, because it's on the blueprint on the blue line. And everybody weighs in before that. - We are- - So the model is really the decision time, when you think what's this gonna be, - And lots of people. - And what's this gonna be, and what's this gonna look like? - And lots and lots of people are in that process. - Wow! - So we ask people to come in and look at what we've drawn, and we get feedback. And today what's wonderful about today's process, is we put it online, and we have people send in images. So people right now are sending us images, and people could do that. They could go to sparcmurals.org, S-P-A-R-C-M-U-R-A-L-S.org. And go into the participation on the Great Wall and tell us what we should put in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties. - [Sheila] Right? - And we get beautiful images, amazing ideas from the public. And we can actually have those come into the design team. - So there's an extension going on now. - [Judith] Right now, we're designing the extensions. - Wow. - The biggest plan we have right now, is the restoration of the Great Wall. And this summer, we'll be back with another team of young people, and university students, and we'll be patching broken paint in the first thousand feet, which is now over 30 years old. - [Sheila] Wow! - And remarkably good condition, considering how long it's been there and been in the rainstorm and, but our goal is to bring it back to it's total vibrance, and to extend it. And truly my dream is that I will be standing on the side of the channel soon, watching the children of the Great Wall, extend it without me. - [Sheila] Huh. - So it will be theirs, they'll be continuing it beyond my time. - Now you said gay kids and straight kids, and all kinds of kids working on it. Are there images of gay people too? - Oh yeah. - That must have been a little controversial when you did it. - Very tough to get done. - [Sheila] Yeah. - We had advisors that were historians, and it was in 1984, and if you remember at that time, the Briggs Amendment was very present in people's minds. And we had children of gay parents, we also had kids who were identifying gay at that point in their lives already, which was, you know, younger. They started becoming more identified younger, and we did a whole segment on the origins of gay rights. So Harry Hayes is in the mural, the daughters of Bilitis are in the mural. In fact, I think it's probably the only representation in Los Angeles of that early gay history. - I think that's right. - Yeah. - Because there's sort of an archives now that one can visit over near SC, but I think visually, I don't really recall any images. - Ginsburg is in the wall, making the connection between the Jewish section and the gay section there. And actually we have the Madison Society depicted. It's a very nice segment. It's really about the vice entrapment of the 1950s. And we made a direct relationship between that and McCarthyism. - It's a very important thing to do visually as well. I mean, one would never identify Judith Bach as a gay activist, which is, you know, she's an artist, but was it ever a controversial issue in your life or in your work if people knew you were gay? - Yes, I mean, I think the most difficult thing has been to walk the line, I think, between this identity politics, in a sense it's a sort of tyranny, I think. The tyranny of identity politics, because in a sense, I struggled to do any of my identities right. (Sheila laughs) Right? - Yeah, sure. - And being at Chicano, it was difficult enough, because there was a certain sort of dictate about how you would be as a Chicano, how you would look, how you would act. The same was true with early lesbian politics in which, you know, at the time that in the early seventies, when people were beginning to be speaking out and so forth, I worked very early on in the first organizations, which was fighting the Briggs Amendment. I mean, it had a very direct impact on my own teaching, and my own ideas. The idea that gay people couldn't teach in high schools or elementary schools was really terrifying. I mean, you can imagine. - Sure. - I signed papers as a city employee that basically said, that I had never had a gay experience or lesbian experience. I mean, people had to sign that, to work as a city employee. - Right. - And that was in the early seventies. And it was very close to the time in the fifties in which vice entrapment was, and the identification and registering of gay people was the norm. I mean, people forget that history, and that was all the way through the fifties. - Right. - In other words, if you moved from one house to the next, and you had been discovered to be gay, we were solicited in the bar for example, by a police officer, which was very often the case. And, particularly for men. And you identified as being gay, then you would have to register, and basically it stopped your employment, your capacity to be employed. So when I started to put that history in the Great Wall for one, all the ethnic historians were saying, "why are you doing this? This has no relationship to this story." And it was actually a really interesting piece of scholarship, because what I did was I began to research deeply, and I knew that it had a relationship, it had a relationship to all the stories of justice. And if we were simply saying, "this is not a story about justice, only things about ethnicity were", you know, then basically women couldn't be included, right? - Right. - So I fought very hard and I realized that the perfect link was the 1950s, perfect link with McCarthyism, and the way that McCarthy used the accusations to name and out gay people. And you know, the whole story of Cohen and- - Yes, right. - Really amazing things like- - Really, well, not amazing. I mean, people in the closet being the most oppressive of all. - Yes. So yes, that terrible period of time. So I made that case and actually my advisors and the people I respected. I mean, I wanted people to believe in what I was doing and not, I wanted consensus building, which is the hardest thing to do. And in the end, people said, "yes, let's do it. Let's do it." So I said, okay, we're going on a ride here, and it's gonna be tough. And then we recruited our kids. We did special sessions with the kids, in which they actually did their role playing as gay teachers and straight teachers. And it was an amazing thing to watch this kids act this out. - So what part does the role playing have for this work? - Well, we actually do one day a week in the classroom with the kids. So they're painting, and we have to make so much footage to get it. It's like making a movie, you have to make much footage week by week to get the piece done. But in addition to that, we're also working with the material. So what they're painting about, becomes something they really deeply understand, and they're crawling across the faces of giant figures. And, they're learning something on a cellular level, almost visceral level, right? They're learning about the four bears of civil rights. I mean, they know Robeson's face better than an archiver, would know his face, right? (Sheila laughs) They know the Harry Hayes, you know, you could ask any of those kids, they will tell you that story 'cause they know it. But, and part of the process is actually sitting in the classroom and working with this material. What did it mean to be deported in the 1930s? Because you were Mexican and in fact you were legal. Many people were deported who were legal. - Right. - 300. - I think we've just apologized for that last year. - He just finally apologize. - Finally, they passed a law to apologize. - 350,000 people were. - Right. - That's conservative estimate. Now people say around 500,000. And so, you know, the kids don't miss it. They walk down the wall, they go, "oh, lemme, we deported them here in the thirties, and then we brought 'em back in the (indistinct) Program in the forties. Oh, and then in the fifties we had repatriation. We had a whole nother opening the operation wet back. And we brought 'em back because we needed them." I mean, back and forth, you could see, they can see it decade by decade, unfolding in the story of the Great Wall. And the point really was justice. The point was that they began to understand, how to work with this material. And so we often do these things, where we assign kids different ethnicities, and they are working with an issue. And in one particular moment, we did the Briggs Amendment because it was happening. And the kids struggled with the issues of creating a jury that would decide looking at gay teachers and straight teachers. And some people played the clergy, and it was fascinating because they had done the Holocaust, and they had learned about the Dutch, and how they had pretended all to be Jewish, so that they couldn't capture the Jews. And my kids, I was very proud of 'em that day. Actually, all decided to be gay teachers, (Sheila laughs) so that there was no way of distinguishing them, straight teachers, change their buttons, disguise themselves, and in the role playing, undermine the whole game, right? Very smart, and they really got the point, that it didn't really matter, this loss for one, was loss for all. The loss of the rights of one, is a loss for all. And if we have taught anything, we've taught that at the Great Wall. - So your, but your project as an artist go on, right? - [Judith] Yes. - Tell us a little bit about the projects that you've been commissioned to do. And I wanna come back at the end because we are extending and refurbishing the Great Wall. - Yes. - And it is such an incredible project, so involving, but I wanna make certain that before we run out of time. - [Judith] Yes. - We understand more about your work as well, because you said something about the Denver Airport. - [Judith] Right. - So where else do we see your work? - The Denver Airport is the largest digital mural that I have in public. It's. - Now, when you say digital mural, what does that mean? - Well, you know, going back to restore the Great Wall and now looking at legacy works as the director of the mural programs for so many years. Our programs now are gone in the city, and you're probably watching the demise of murals all over our city. One of the great tragedies of Los Angeles at the moment, is that the mural program has ended, that SPARC has been defunded with these projects. And I think it's a terrible mistake for our city to lose these things. Another generation is not learning about the importance of this work, but what I started to do after the program ended was to really look at how we could produce new works, that would not need restoration 30 years from now. And so we've been producing a new technology, new methods of technology, using computer generated programs to actually create murals that are printed on giant substrates, and then painted, for example, which speed up the process, or output at pieces that can be installed on the sides of buildings, which means of course that, in the long run, in the future, they can be completely refurbished by being reprinted. And we don't have the process of needing hundreds and thousands of dollars to restore number by number, dot by dot, a mural that has been hand painted. So we've actually been generating some pretty exciting new ways of making digital work. So the Denver national piece, is a work that is hand painted first, placed into the computer, photographic information is also in it, so that the land's memory can be seen. The memories come right up out of the land, that's painted. It's put it onto aluminum, and installed in the airport. And if you run your card into it, I simply replace it. - Wow! - So it's a really great example of, almost a luminescent bronze set of work. I also finished a piece for the CAREC group, the Central American Resource and Education Center, had the great pleasure of telling the family's stories of the people, what we call the migration of the golden people. This is the people from El Salvador, who came and who gave me their family photographs, told the story of the disappeared, told the story of their country at war, and why they left. And I worked with their children for 28 weeks, myself and Pete Galindo, and many younger people who were leading those teams, my students leading the teams, and excavated the whole story and then created a giant digital mural, which we printed in our studios, adhered to the walls, and can replace. - Huh. - Or replicate. And it's on hope and seventh. The other exciting thing is we've been working across distance, so that I collaborate with four cities with middle school children. - Ah huh. - Teaching them to generate metaphors on the 50th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycot. - [Sheila] Right. - And one of the children said, "freedom is an empty bus." And we used the empty bus, and Martin Luther King's church coming into the side of the bus, people pouring off the buses, and walking rather than suffer the indignity of segregation. And that work gets produced digitally, and sent back to the four schools. - Wow! - In Boston, in Baltimore, in New York and in Philadelphia. - [Sheila] Huh! - So we can work over distance. So it's very exciting work. And the great pleasure of it, is that using the same belief system, one that art can come, and art is for everybody, from the poorest kids in Harlem, that we worked with, that all people's ideas are important, and that we can listen to them, and incorporate them. That the land in a sense has memory, that we are playing with the memories, we're bringing the memories to forth. And that if we can bring the past into the present, perhaps we can change the future. - Well, I was thinking of that when you were talking about looking at, just immigration or the way we thought about immigrants in the thirties and forties and fifties, and I assume as you continue the wall, the sixties and seventies and eighties and nineties. - [Judith] And this time right now will be one of the most important to talk about now. - Well and how we don't learn in a sense, or we don't know how to learn in a sense from history I think, because in trying to do public policy in the current day, as we do in the legislature, even when you know, what has been tried, some of the problems are so large that you think, let's try another idea, not so much that that one didn't work, but either a refinement of that or whatever. And I see things go back and forth, and almost what we learn is what doesn't work, but very rarely what does work, because maybe nothing works perfectly, and we have too high expectations, but documenting history, and understanding people's place in it. I don't know, sometimes I feel like I want to be able to project on the next panel, you know, what this leads to, but sometimes it's just such a cacophony. - Yes. - Beautiful. And it's voices, and it's the history of our city, or nation or whatever, but sometimes you just don't know how to learn from history. - Well, you know, I think in a sense, I think that's true and not true. I think what happens is that we lose sight. In other words, we see what history teaches us, but we miss the essential lesson, the essential lesson being, the underlying piece of values that we are communicating to ourselves and to the world. And that comes about from, maybe the very political process itself of compromise, that it's so hard to hold to a set of values, that we really believe in and see them to fruition. I mean, who can say that they have been able to do that? What bill have you ever written that you could say, "this is really what I meant," right? Because I think the truth is, is that we could really get to what you really meant, it would work. - Well, it is interesting, the difference between saying something or enacting something and the implementation of it. - [Judith] Yes. - And yet sometimes you need the word, that says, "you will not discriminate, and then we'll figure out later what that means." - That's right. - But I'm gonna say that right now, you know, and it has, I think, made a difference. It's interesting we're talking about, the inclusion of gay people as a, it's like, well, they're not like the other minority, so that's, you know, not a part of it. I have a bill now that actually builds on, a couple of rules in the schools in California, that says, "you can't adopt materials that reflect adversely on people, on the basis of race, gender, religion, ethnicity," and I'm adding sexual orientation, and gender identity. Then there's another section of the code that says, "you must teach California history. And when you teach California history, you must include the roles and contributions of," and here the law says, "African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, native Americans, men, women, the labor movement, entrepreneurs." So I'm adding gay. - That's quite good. - Lesbian, you know, bisexual. - Yeah. - Transgendered people, because we're there, you just don't say that we're there. - Right. And. - Well, disappearance is the greatest disrespect. - Exactly, silence is like invisibility. I mean, it's really all part of the same thing, and the inclusion that you find in our history, and make certain is reflected, seems to me to be enormously important. So what's gonna be in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties, how do you figure that out? - Well, it's interesting, what's rolling in, I mean, either it's gonna be enormously difficult to do. I mean, the sixties is always made me shutter a bit in terms of how do you do this thing? For one, it's a time in which I lived through as a conscious human being. - [Sheila] Right. - So it wasn't like sort of blurred in childhood for me. So I had this, you know, my own set of ideas and yet, I mean, what is it, I mean, should I design something pulled out in a Giant Paisley or a Psychedelic Mess? (Sheila laughs) Should we do it through the blur of drugs in some way? (Sheila laughs) I don't know, or should it be all in the light of the Vietnam war, or the loss of three great peop leaders, like Martin Luther king, and Robert F. Kennedy, and well, John FK, you know, so how will this be depicted? And I think actually, as it starting to fall out? It's also a time in which it's not really easy, to look at ethnic groups set apart? - Well, that's a very interesting thing about it too. And, you know, since we only have almost a minute left. - Well, really? - I know doesn't, the hour go by fast? (Judith laughs) I always think it does. - Quite fast. - I think we're going to we wanna show a little bit more of the work. - Aha. - That you brought us, probably at the end of the show, and I have to go, I think, to your website, to keep track of- - Yes. - How these images are developing, and how the great world. - We invite people to tell us, but to send in, one of my favorite contributions so far, is a young man who said, "if you're gonna do the nineties in Los Angeles, he sent me a beautiful drawing of an Aztec warrior, with a leaf bolt blower on his back." (Sheila laughs) (Judy laughs) - Well, I think it is interesting, the way the city has developed. I thank you so much for being on the show. I think it's just really fascinating, the contributions of all of our folks, and you certainly are among a lot of different kinds of folks, all in one. Not to mention, not only your own combination, but the history that you were talking about, you know, the generations that came before you, and your family and who came before us here. And I'm really glad that you were with us today. I really want you to see the Great Wall. I want you to go onto the website. I want you to understand that we're part of an enormously complex and beautiful fabric of history. So we really have to "Get Used To It". (upbeat music)