Judy Baca
Absolutely Chicana, 2008
Serigraph, Edition 14 of 70
26 x 20 in.

Absolutely Chicana is a work about identity constructed to face a hostile environment for women and for Chicana's in the 1950's. It is derived from a photograph taken of Judy Baca in 1973 by Donna Deith for what was the first exclusively "Chicana" show in Los Angeles called 'Las Venas de la Mujer'. The image of Judy Baca as the 'Pachuca' was created as part of a performance in which she transformed herself into the Pachuca via a mirror on the vanity table. Behind the mirror was the Chican Triptych called the 'Tres Marias' now part of the Smithsonian Latino Treasures Collection. The image seems relevant again in the current climate of Chicana/o identity ambivalence.

Judy Baca is the founder/artistic director of SPARC: Social & Public Art Resource Center in Los Angeles. Best known for her large-scale public organizing murals, her art involves extensive community dialogues and participation. Baca founded the first City of Los Angeles mural program in 1974 and founded SPARC in 1976. Baca's signature piece is The Great Wall of Los Angeles, one of the city's true cultural landmarks and one of the country's most respected and largest monuments to interracial harmony produced with the participation with more than 400 inner-city youth, 40 ethnic historians, and hundreds of community residents.

In 1996, Baca created the UCLA/SPARC Cesar Chavez Digital/Mural Lab, a research, teaching, and production facility based at SPARC. She serves as a full professor in the UCLA Chicano Studies Department and World Arts and Cultures Department. She is currently working on the Cesar Chavez Memorial at San Jose State University; the Robert F. Kennedy monument at the Old Ambassador Hotel site, which will become the RFK Learning Center for K-12; the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in San Diego; and a digital painted mural for the Richmond Arts Center.