JUDITH F. BACA: WORLD WALL
September 10, 2022–February 19, 2023
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
Chicana artist Judith F. Baca began her collaborative, portable mural World Wall: A Vision of the Future Without Fear in 1987. An ambitious, utopian, and international project, World Wall is rooted in the philosophy that in order to achieve world peace, we must first be able to envision it.Judith Francisca Baca 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 in Venice, California. (*)
Baca painted the first four ten-by-thirty-foot canvas panels; as the work traveled abroad, between 1990 and 2014, artists and community groups from Finland, Russia, Israel and Palestine, Mexico, and Canada contributed five additional panels, employing figurative and symbolic visual vocabularies to depict a vision of the future without fear. All nine panels will be shown at MOCA in an enveloping installation.
Significantly, this exhibition, in the artist’s hometown of Los Angeles is the first-ever complete presentation of this monumental project. Pointing to the legacies of both the Chicano arts movement of the 1970s and Mexican muralism movement of the 1920s, this timely exhibition considers the visionary role of activist-artists in imagining a peaceful future for us all.
* Source: Wikipedia, other works cited /used, MOCA Geffen, official press release. Used with kind courtesy.
