World Famous Los Angeles Muralist is Speaking at the Honoring Women’s Rights Conference in Salinas

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Judy Baca is a world-renowned painter and muralist

The mural tells the forgotten stories of people who, like birds or water, traveled back and forth across the land freely, before there was a line .

Salinas, CA (PRWEB) July 18, 2012

Judy Baca agreed to be a speaker at the September 8 Honoring Women’s Rights conference at the National Steinbeck Center, supported by the Pacific Regional Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA). Baca is at the top of a distinguished list of artist creators. She is one of the most remarkable public artists for social transformation in modern American history. One of her most indelible quotes is, “Collaborative art brings a range of people into conversations about their visions for their neighborhoods and their nations. Finding a place for those ideas in monuments that are constructed of the soil and spirit of the people is the most challenging task for public artists in this time.”
Baca believes her grand scale inspirations come from the way she was raised – she walked to grade school through hot fields of weeds and grasses adjacent to agricultural fields and recalls her grandmother talk kindly to plants as if they were personal friends. She muses, “The concept of the Land's memory is not new for me. I can first remember my thoughts that the land could remember all that had occurred in a particular place. I thought the land was recording all that had occurred there. I needed only to listen to the land to hear the story.”
In 1996, she designed “La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra” (Our Land Has Memory) for the Denver International Airport. This was personal expression of her roots. Her grandparents fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution and came to La Junta, Colorado. The mural "not only tells the forgotten stories of people who, like birds or water, traveled back and forth across the land freely, before there was a line that distinguished which side you were from, but to speak to our shared human condition as temporary residents of the earth… The making of this work was an excavation of a remembering of their histories." This mural was completed in 2000.
Baca’s Honoring Women’s Rights conference title is, “Feminist Representation and the Public Art of Judy Baca". The conference is in celebration of Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) 40th anniversary at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, CA.

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