This serves to harmonize the colors as well as to cut the glare of the sunlight in the painter’s eyes.
After the lines are drawn and painted a dark blue, a transparent magenta undercoat is applied over the entire surface. Grid lines are marked on the wall to match those on the blueprints, and the images are transferred‑a process that provides on‑the‑job math (as well as drawing) training for the kids. On site work begins with heavy labor: Sandblasting, waterblasting and sealing the surface. The blueprints are 1 X 2 foot drawings used to transfer the drawing to the wall. The finished drawings are blueprinted or turned into large drawings for pounce transfers. They also receive art instruction, attend lectures from historians specializing in ethnic history, do improvisational theater and team-building exercises and acquire the important skill of learning to work together in a context where the diversity of their cultures is the focus.Īfter the subjects to be included are selected and sketched, finished designs are made by Baca amd a team of artists and youth selected to work under her direction on the “design team”.
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The youths are supervised by professional artists who work with them four to eight hours a day. Funds must be raised, research begun, artist supervisors hired. In 19 additional youth were hired through a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation. These Mural Makers, mostly from low income families, are paid through the Summer Youth Employment Program. Those selected are employed as assistants and participate in both the planning and execution of the mural. Youth of varied ethnic backgrounds between the ages of 14 and 21 must be recruited and interviewed.
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The completed mural, which will run for nearly a mile, will take history to the present and beyond to future panels which will be formulated by a planning commission composed of and veteran youth Mural Makers, artists and representatives for the Great Wall’s diverse sponsors.Įach section takes a full year to research, organize, and execute. However impressive the part currently completed may be, it is only part of a work in progress. To date, the length of the Great Wall totals 2,754 feet, and the number of participating youths has reached over 400.
In the summer of 1983, a new segment was painted, depicting the decade of the 1950′s. With the completion of the decade of the Forties in September, 1981, the total length reached 2,085 feet while the number of young people who had worked on the mural rose to 185. Each year they added 350 feet and a decade of history seen from the viewpoint of California ethnic groups: Their contributions and their struggles to overcome obstacles.īy 1980 the mural, dubbed “The Great Wall” rather than its official name “The History of California,” stretched more than a third of a mile and had consumed some 600 gallons of paint and 65,000 kid‑hours. Mural Makers worked in the wash again in the summers of 1978, 1980, 19.
But Baca, executive director of the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Venice, California, with a history of large collaborative mural projects behind her, was not ready to stop at 1910. The Great Wall was already the longest mural after the summer of 1976 when a team of 80 youths referred by the criminal justice department, ten artists and five historians collaborated under the direction of Chicana artist Judith Francisco Baca to paint 1, 000 feet of California history from the days of dinosaurs to 1910 in the Tujungo Wash drainage canal in the San Fernando Valley. Throughout the years, assistance has come from the Summer Youth Employment Program, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Flood Control District. In recent years, more private sector funding has made the Great Wall possible. In the first several years, SPARC received a great deal of support for the project from governmental juvenile justice funding sources. This support has taken the form of cash contributions, donations of supplies and equipment, and offered services. Production of the Great Wall has involved the support of many government agencies, community organizations, businesses, corporations, foundations, and individuals. Two years later the alchemy of converting concrete eyesore into community treasure began. Baca about the possibility of creating a mural in the flood control channel as part of a beautification project that included a mini‑park and bicycle path.
In 1974, the Army Corps of Engineers contacted Judith F.