Posted: November 8th, 2005

L.A. history, widescreen version

By Alex Dobuzinskis, Staff Writer
LA Daily News

VALLEY GLEN
Painting the world’s longest mural took the work of 400 teens armed with brushes and rulers, many of them from communities as ignored as the social history they splashed along a half-mile of the Tujunga Wash.

More than 20 years later, Judith Baca, creator of the “Great Wall of Los Angeles” near Los Angeles Valley College, wants to involve another generation of youths and get the community involved to bring the mural back to life.

Last year, the wall was hit with graffiti for the first time. And its first 1,000 feet was fading fast until Baca and her crew covered the whole thing with a resin coating. The next step would be to restore the most faded sections.

The mural was started with public funding to help rehabilitate juvenile delinquents. After receiving money from other sources and bringing in other groups of teens, the project went on to span more than 2,700 feet and depict California and U.S. history from prehistoric times to the 1950s, emphasizing the history of minority communities.

“The soul of the problem is to re-energize the work in the community,” Baca said. “It fades but it also fades from people’s memory and understanding.”

Begun in planning and design in 1974 and completed over five summers between 1976 and 1983, the mural was painted with the help of 400 youths and with the advice of hundreds of artists, scholars and residents.

The teens used rulers to paint from a blueprint onto the glaring wall of the concrete wash.

Many came from troubled backgrounds and poor neighborhoods. All of the teens were paid, and some might have gotten into graffiti if not for having the wall to work on as an outlet.

“I think actually the Great Wall had a pretty profound (amount) of respect going on because it had the good karma from all of those years of people working on it,” said Baca, who grew up in Pacoima.

“Really, probably a thousand people worked on it. Somebody was related to somebody who worked on it.”

Restoration work began last year and continued this past summer.

Baca hopes to bring in 20 to 30 youths next summer to work on the first 1,000 feet, which goes from depicting the mammoth and other ice-age animals, to American-Indian life to early California history. The youths would collaborate with adults who worked on the mural themselves as teens.

The Venice-based Social and Public Art Resource Center, an organization Baca founded, received about $310,000 to restore the mural, including $100,000 earmarked by the City Council in 2000. Most of the money went to coating the mural with a protective resin, but some went to producing informative material and for fundraising.

SPARC officials say they need another $340,000 to complete the restoration work on the mural, which cost $1 million to make originally.

SPARC expects to finish restoration work in 2008.

“This mural is a piece of history in the San Fernando Valley,” said City Councilwoman Wendy Greuel. “It is a mural that depicts several historic occurrences, not only in Los Angeles but across the country. And so I want to do everything I can to preserve it and to ensure that it is brought up to its original beauty.”

The mural is located in Valley Glen along Coldwater Canyon Avenue, from Oxnard Street to Burbank Boulevard.

Much of the panoramic mural is dedicated to the history of ordinary Americans and minority groups - Hispanic-Americans, American Indians, African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Jewish-Americans - instead of focusing on public leaders.

In one segment, Dodger Stadium descends like a UFO on Chavez Ravine, forcing the eviction of the Latinos living there.

Images flow together and foreshadow events that come later in history. In one segment, a clothesline hung across an arid landscape links an image of the 1930s Dust Bowl refugees to portraits of Japanese-Americans in a desert internment camp during World War II.

Priscilla Rouse Becker, 41, of Ventura was a teen from Lake View Terrace when she started working on the project in 1980.

“I was a team sport player, but this was a different opportunity to work together with a group of people to achieve something great,” she said. “Something bigger than ourselves by far.”

Becker said stories she heard from her parents growing up were similar to the episodes of social history depicted on the wall.

“I would say if all I knew was what I learned in a history class … as a black person I would feel inferior,” she said.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art contemporary art curator Howard N. Fox said the contribution of many different people to the overall mosaic of the mural is crucial to its meaning.

“It’s the very embodiment of many of the values that are depicted in the mural itself,” Fox said. “So the creation of the mural becomes not only a finished product that announces … a value of social interaction; it actually becomes an instance, it becomes a fulfillment of those very values.”

The nonprofit SPARC has done some early designs of the segments that will depict the decades since the 1950s. But, before the work of extending the mural goes forward, its creators have to go back and restore what they did when they were younger.

“This summer when I was painting I was having this experience where I was moving my hand across a mark that I made 20 years ago,” said Baca, 59. “I started to remember, and I started to have this sort of ultimate respect for the fact that I did know something then.”