One of America’s leading visual artists and LACMA’s 2023 Art+Film Honoree, Los Angeles–based Chicana muralist Dr. Judith F. Baca has been creating public art for over five decades. Striking in size and subject matter, Baca’s murals bring art to where people live and work. In 1974, Baca founded the City of Los Angeles’s first mural program, which produced over 400 murals, employed thousands of local participants, and evolved into the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) arts organization.
Shortly after completing the first half-mile of her best-known work, The Great Wall of Los Angeles mural in the San Fernando Valley, Baca participated in the Olympic Arts Festival directed by Robert Fitzpatrick, then president of California Institute of the Arts. Recognizing the importance of muralism to the city as a communal and accessible art form, the Olympic Mural Commission organized artists, including Baca, to paint 10 murals on the retaining walls of the downtown freeway system to prepare for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Fitzpatrick saw the Los Angeles freeways as the route to the Olympics and worthy of art, just as the paths in Olympia, Greece, once had statues.
Baca’s Hitting the Wall: Women in the Marathon mural graces the 4th Street off-ramp of the Harbor Freeway and commemorates the women’s marathon at the 1984 games—the first women’s marathon in Olympic history. The mural depicts a commanding moment of a 25-foot-tall woman running through and breaking a turquoise stone wall. Inspired by the stone blocks in Jorge González Camarena’s “Liberación” mural in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, Baca incorporated turquoise stone elements that symbolize an old patriarchal order. The woman marathon runner is not only breaking a finish line but also a symbolic rope that once obstructed her.
Since then, Hitting the Wall has been affected by repeated defacement and erasure from public sight. In 2022, the Getty Center exhibited these drawings alongside footage of the mural’s restoration efforts the previous year. The history of the mural’s restoration poetically parallels the challenges that many historically marginalized communities continue to endure. To underline the continuous vulnerability of mural art, it is critical to preserve these preparatory drawings and completed renderings that highlight Baca’s design and painting process, making explicit the development of the composition from the punto system and mural grid to full coloration.
Throughout her career, Baca has created art shaped by an interactive relationship between history, people, and place. Her murals focus on revealing and reconciling peoples’ struggles and affirm the connections of each community to sites of public memory, ultimately giving form to monuments that rise out of neighborhoods. Now more than ever, Hitting the Wall underscores the significance of women and communities of color breaking barriers. Baca says, “I use that metaphor for the marathon running of women’s rights. It’s not achieved; we are still struggling. There have been many rollbacks on equality.”
While Baca continues to serve as SPARC’s Artistic Director and can be seen currently at LACMA expanding The Great Wall of Los Angeles, these rare preliminary drawings of Hitting the Wall demonstrate Baca’s draftsmanship and provide original documentation of one of the city’s most iconic public works of art. This is the first group of works by Baca to enter the museum’s collection and join a handful of works commemorating not only the Olympics but also artistic interventions in the fight for equity. As Los Angeles prepares to host the 2028 Olympics, the drawings provide LACMA a wonderful opportunity to continue developing its permanent collection of Los Angeles–based Chicana artists and to further recognize muralism as an art form that has shaped the city’s urban landscape.
During our 38th annual Collectors Committee Weekend (April 27–28, 2024), members of LACMA's Collectors Committee generously helped the museum acquire 10 works of art spanning a breadth of eras and cultures. Read more about all the acquisitions.