Women Artists

"Art is inevitably the expression of external conditions, modified though they be by the genius and personality of the artist."

"My work has been ignored a lot in LA … and the men here have been pretty profoundly unable to see women as their peers. That’s been the struggle of my whole life as a Chicana and activist and feminist. It’s created a devil-may-care attitude for me. I had to just perceive what I was doing as significant for myself and my community and move ahead with willfulness and belief, buoyed by the community people I worked with – not by the arts."

"Student activism has translated into community activism. In southern California alone, many women exemplify the credo of giving back to your community. Judy Baca is an internationally renowned muralist whose work brings Chicano history to life."

"Judy invented a model of public art...Rather than plop down a monument or a sculpture, without accounting for the people around it, Judy really started a model where you have that community engagement early on in the neighborhood. So people in the neighborhood had a sense of connection with the work."

"Judy Baca is one of our great feminist artists...She has not received the kind of attention she should have received over the course of her career. She has been a low and steady and every day practitioner."

"a great American artist who has always had a strong sense of place, occasion and history."

"One legacy of muralism is to make the point that we are losing the public commons. We should recognize we need them and fight for them. Parks and schools can be commons. Spaces and arts should not be privatized. Arts should be public..."

"(How has the city changed over the decades?) In the 70's we were so engaged - that's a hard one for me, to try not to discount the losses, to see what is hopeful. I feel a lot of times that we've lost leadership. There's no Cesar Chavez or Robert Kennedy. We've lost the great inspiring role models that gave us ideas about a bigger self. We started to value the celebrity, the person who got his. Television is continually about advancing the renovation of your house, about objects and material. Where do we learn the bigger values, a shared sense of community and activities? We repeatedly reduce the commons, the spaces where we meet across race and class and difference. I'm very concerned about loss of the commons. People need more and more to remember the nature of human beings. We are social beings. As humans we are tribal, we need to be in community, we thrive in that situation with one another and grow by virtue with that."

"(Do you have any advice for young people?) To dream big, to not hold back these dreams. Imagine yourself in places you never have been, to have a bigger idea, to not be afraid to make mistakes. If you make mistakes, make passionate mistakes. Move through narrow visions of who you will be. Have a dream bigger than your families."

"What we need more now is to make art that is about connection. Mural painting is a perfect form, the oldest form, we know those cave guys were marking those walls for magic. Those guys were shamans who recorded history. I haven't traveled far from these ideas, that particular role, or consciousness, so that you can elevate your worries about global warming into a song that will move the souls of everybody in the room. This is a different and bigger role than the western European visions of art. This vision goes back to the ancient American. I like to say mural painting is a form made in connectedness, connected to architecture, to the river, where we made our first huge mistake in the city. We concreted the artery, and my job was to begin healing the river and the people. We are connected to that river, we are connected to living things, the whole planet, the Gaia, the large philosophical point of view, the creation of another idea of what can be."

"I was trained as a minimal and gestural painter, in color theory, color optics, that's what was popular in the universities. And then I walked into a moment in history when the civil rights movement was in full effect. The Chicano Moratorium against the Viet Nam war, Cesar Chavez, Belvedere Park, I was there. I was in Cal State Northridge when students occupied the administration building. I thought, "Okay, I am perfectly suited to do nothing about any of these issues, I am a color field painter, what good am I?" On the night of my graduation, my grandmother said sweetly in Spanish, "What is it good for, what does it do?" Everything in her life had reason and meaning, even the little plants growing by the water fountain in her yard in South Central were used for healing. She could turn a stick in a coffee can into a beautiful thing, and I thought to myself, "I've got to learn what this is for." I began to systematically unlearn and move away from elitist system of arts. I realized that arts lived in all people. More primitive cultures have a culture of gifts, so the gift grows as it's given. In the potlatch of the Northwest, the tribal chief who gives you the goats expects you to have a big feast. In our culture, the gift giving culture meets capitalist culture, the culture of acquisition, where we value what men acquire instead of what they give away. In old cultures, those who gave the most were the most regarded. I began to see that if art were given away, it would grow. I began to answer my grandmother's questions one by one, and began to change the way I made art. The scale had to be big enough to include others. I had to think about we as opposed to me, the creation of family versus the agency of the individual. As I started to do that, I began to see I was very good at that."

"Some of the young people found in the arts a place to live, but I wasn't intending to make them artists, I wanted to make them citizens, part of the world they lived in."

"It doesn't matter if it's art or digging a ditch, building an airplane or making a sculpture, what matters is that it's a creative, innovative act. That the hands of the group have more power joined together. What really matters is the collaboration and skills young people develop figuring out how to get it done."

"I will hire anyone who has the will and the capacity and will put down a knife for brushes! The deal was, no violence. We had to enforce this; it was always a negotiation. The kids had to find other ways to express conflict."

"(You have mentored so many young people. Who was a mentor for you?) Gilbert Roland, the actor. He was one of the first to break the notions of who a Mexican actor was. He was a silent movie star and was in the original talkies. He was the original Cisco Kid, a vaquero. He created the character of the gentleman who was a beautiful Latin lover, with a shot of whiskey and a rose in a vase on the bar. He would smell the rose before throwing back the whiskey. He had both tenderness and strength. Women's leadership can be both vulnerable and strong, that's the trick."

"I'm interested in stepping outside the traditional role of arts, the creation of beautiful paintings bought by wealthy people to decorate their homes. People with expendable wealth could acquire art and determine who could see it. For me, art could go where my family went, in neighborhoods where museums are as foreign as the moon, so that working and poor people who had a great appreciation of beauty could see the murals and live with them. I was fighting a whole series of stereotypes..."

"I was expanding the role of women in my own thoughts. I wanted to break all the rules. Women don’t build in massive scale, women don’t build monuments or make public art. Women play with dollhouses; they don’t make architectural statements, they don’t build Disney Hall. There is no financial backing for women to develop the agency of a Frank Gehry. Women will never have that power in my lifetime."

"Arts are a magnificent way to deal with multilingual people. Arts are an entryway."

"Murals can do some amazing work in the world, because they live in the places where people live and work, because they can be made in relationship to the people who see them, because the people themselves can have input, if it’s done in a profound way. And that’s what I intend to keep doing as long as I’m standing here on earth."

"I always thought I’d make a work and it’d go out into the ether, never to be seen again or spoken about,” she said. “But I realized that when I was making it, that I was processing through my hands, and through my art. I was finding a way to live with truth that was hard and difficult. It was a way of keeping me sane, and keeping me in the process of healing, and healing those around me"

"In some ways, we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us"

"I have created nothing really beautiful, really lasting, but if I can inspire one of these youngsters to develop the talent I know they possess, then my monument will be in their work."

"That musical time is a way of like creating a rhythm within the piece. And it was an amazing experience for me to see how when lines, directional lines, went through forms -- how forms, if moved to fit within the ratio, to hit the points. Like in other words, if an arm flies out, it goes to the point. Suddenly there's this like visual kind of connection between the forms, and it fits like, clicks like pieces of a puzzle, right into place…"

"They very often would let me paint, you know, instead of doing some of the other lessons, because I didn't speak English well enough. So I had a lot of painting. And I brought the paintings home with great pride, and my mother kept them for years, so I do know that I sort of…That was a place that I actually remember the smell of those materials and the texture of the surfaces and just, you know, kind of having this real visceral love of moving that color around -- which is, I think, you know, I still have that…"

"Murals are not easel paintings,” Baca said. “They’re not individual works created for simple self-expression of your opinion in a public space. To do public works means that you’re making something. A real mural is connected to the architecture in which it’s placed, connected to the people for whom it’s painted and connected to who you paint with. And when it is incredibly well done, it’s like a choreographed dance."

"All my pieces are about resilience in the face of adversity"

"We are sneered at for not being the social and intellectual equals, after sixty years of Western civilization, of people with thousands of years of this same civilization; yet when we set out to try to lessen the distance between us we are treated as if the attempt were a crime. Why not give us the chance to try? Are some white people really afraid that we might succeed?"

"Isn't it rather odd that such people should always suppose that when a colored girl gets a chance to develop her natural powers it must be that she will want to become white? It gets to be a tiresome task explaining to them that the desire to become better or more capable is a common quality of all human beings."

"He almost whipped the art out of me."

"I hear so many complaints to the effect that Negroes do not take advantage of the educational opportunities offered them. Well, one of the reasons why more of my race do not go in for higher education is that as soon as one of us gets his head above the crowd there are millions of feet ready to crush it back again to that dead level of commonplace thus creating a racial deadline of culture in our Republic. For how am I to compete with other American artists if I am not to be given the same opportunity?"

"I was a Leap Year baby, and it seems to me that I have been leaping ever since."

"The challenge from the beginning was just the diversity and ‘We don’t really know what to do with you’ and ‘There’s not going to be a lot of work for you."

"I realized it had everything to do with how I grew up and the interaction I had with my father, that he was somewhat abusive…That made me understand that your body retains not just physical damage, but emotional perforations."

"I think that art helps evaluate some of the psychology of yourself as a child, and to illuminate some things you may never have understood."

"Everyone has a different format for how they want to reveal what they are thinking, or what they are seeing, to the audience…I just had to let go of the audience and just started thinking about what I wanted to see."

"You can't allow fear to take over your life. If you do, you'll look back and you'll have regrets. I learned this a long time ago, because I think "my God, my parents came over from another country". It would be really scary for me to move to China and leave everything behind. But I have to remember that fear is something everyone feels and it's natural. You might feel fear 10 times a day in your life, and you have to try to understand it…"

"Growing up as somebody from another country, really, not what you see on television, I never saw myself in the forefront, ever. We were always in the background."

"The lack of predictability with television is something that’s constantly changing what your perception of who you think your character is…"

"The whole point of defining races is mostly to put people down, and so those needs change over time."

"We need to recognize the destructive role played by the media in fanning the flames of the "Black-Jewish Conflict." Cornel West, bell hooks, Richard Green, Barbara Christian, Henry Louis Gates, Marian Wright Edelman, Nell Painter, Albert Raby....Why are these names not as well known outside the African American community as the names of Louis Farrakhan or Leonard Jeffries? Are they, in their diversity and dynamism, less representative of the African American community?"

"We discover through genetics or the genome or through culture, through migration and so forth, anthropology that racist dont exist, biologically, that you can't box people up in little boxes according to race."

"Just because you say that things in the 21 century are not the same as they were in the 20th century, doesnt mean that you're saying that we're in a post-racial society. We are not in a post-racial society, but things are not like they were in the age of segregation or slavery."

"What has changed in the 21st century is that what we think of as class privilege can go a long way in blunting the color phobia"

"The idea of beauty being white, that is another enlightenment idea, actually, an 18th-century idea by another German, named Winckelmann, who's the father of art history"

"I live in Newark, which was heavily - actually bulldozed in the 1960s in urban renewal. And we think of urban renewal as harming black people, which of course it did, but it also hit some other vulnerable people, and Italian-American neighborhoods also got it."

"Before desegregation, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, all those laws, exclusionary laws, were meant to keep Negroes out."

"We still have slavery in the world today. and two of the areas pinpointed for slavery are Latin America, notably Brazil, and Eastern Asia."

"The census keeps counting us by race for purposes of undoing racial harm in the past."

"Our search for understanding in matters of race automatically inclines us toward blackness."

"I think that’s the kind of relationship between recognition and black women. That you have to be an optimist to think something’s going to work out and just keep trying because if you concentrate on the really awful actual facts of life, then you’ll just crawl into bed and pull the covers over your head."