About the artist:

Judith Francisca Baca (born September 20, 1946) is an American artist, activist, and professor of Chicano studies, world arts, and cultures based at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, California. Baca is the director of the mural project that created the Great Wall of Los Angeles, which was the largest known communal mural project in the world as of 2018.

Baca was born in Watts, Los Angeles on September 20, 1946, to Mexican American parents. Her military father never knew of her existence and moved back to the east coast after her birth. In her early life in Watts, she was raised in a predominately Black and Latino area. She lived in an all-female household composed of her mother, her aunts Rita and Delia, and her grandmother Francisca. Her grandmother was an herbal healer and practiced curanderismo,  which profoundly influenced her sense of indigenous Chicano culture.

Baca's mother later married Clarence Ferrari in 1952, and the three of them moved to Pacoima, Los Angeles. Pacoima was drastically different from Watts – Mexican-Americans were minorities in Pacoima.  Baca has a half-brother Gary and half-sister Diane.

Baca was not allowed to speak Spanish in elementary school, as it was prohibited, but she did not know English very well. Her teacher would tell her to go paint in the corner while the other children studied. After some time, Baca started getting better in classes once she was able to understand the textbooks. With the encouragement of her art teacher, she began drawing and painting. She later graduated from Bishop Alemany High School in 1964.

She then attended California State University, Northridge (CSUN) and earned her bachelor's degree in 1969 and a master's degree in fine art in 1979. Judy was the first Baca to attend college, and actually quit for a brief period of time after becoming tired of being poor. She sought out a job in production illustration and worked there until she was inspired to go back to college and get a Bachelors of Fine Art.[4] While there, she learned and studied modern abstract art. She wanted to make art that was accessible beyond the constraints of the gallery and the museum. She wanted to make art for the people she loved, but she knew that they didn't go to galleries. "I thought to myself, if I get my work into galleries, who will go there? People in my family hadn't ever been to a gallery in their entire lives. My neighbors never went to galleries...And it didn't make sense to me at the time to put art behind some guarded wall." After completing graduate school, Baca continued her education, studying muralism at La Tallera in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

As a Chicana woman, she wanted to empower women of color and bring community together in Los Angeles. Baca did so by illuminating the beauty and power enriched in Chicana culture through public art. The processes behind the images that Baca created are equally powerful—Baca's premise in her artistic process was to involve disempowered youth in order to evoke a sense of community and enable growth. In some ways, these acts cause Baca's art to be feminist. On the other hand, identity is personal, and only Baca has the agency to identify herself and her art as feminist. After divorcing her husband and moving to Venice she becomes involved with "Consciousness Raising" meetings. After being invited to one of the meetings by her new landlord, Baca says she began meeting other professional women for the first time in her life. "Women who were doctors, and lawyers, and biologists, and chemists, and I had never met anybody like that. I was like completely amazed at the possibility of what was available for women". Through these she was introduced to feminist art by Judy Chicago and inspired by a few of her works, naming Woman's Space, Woman's Building, and the Feminist Studio Workshop.