Judith F. Baca Artist, educator, activist by Ayan Sekerbekov

Judith F. Baca

Artist, educator, activist

Born: Los Angeles, California

“I want to use public space to create a public voice for, and a public consciousness about people who are, in fact, the majority of the population but are not represented in any visual way.”

 -Judith Baca

One of America’s leading muralists, Judith Baca believes that art is a tool for social change and self-transformation, capable of fostering civic dialogue in the most places. Raised in a strong, all-female household, Baca was especially influenced by the values of her grandmother, a Mexican herbal healer. In 1974, Baca founded the City of Loc Angeles’ first mural program, and in 1976 she co-founded the Social and Public Art Resource Center, which promotes community-based, participatory public arts projects. Since 1980 she has been a professor at the University of California, first at Irvine and since 1996 at UCLA.

Gauguin by Cynthia Brown

Paul Gauguin was born in 1848 to Clovis and Aline Gauguin. He had never known the security of family life or a stable home, even from his earlist years, for his father, Clovis Gauguin, a republican journalist, died on board ship while taking his young family into political exile in South America. Paul Gauguin was just two when they reached Peru and he spent four years there, with his mother and sister, under the protection of distant relatives. By the time he was seven he and his family were living back in France under the wing of a bachelor uncle.

My Take on Jenny Saville by Manola Maldonado

Jenny Saville Paints a torso of a dead pig in monumental dimensions. The design has strong airs of erotica; meaning I could compare it to a woman in a pornographic pose. This purpose was hard for me to understand, at first. Then I realized, it was pointing out the plain reality of how women in our society are marketed as meat. Chopped to perfect proportions and dimensions with only the necessary things inside. Ready to grill baby!

She makes all of her pieces huge to further shock and in turn: get people’s attention. On another note, Saville’s use of color, her manipulations with every brush stroke, is absolutely genius. This was no accident people. The way her brush strokes, move my eye around the painting. Always landing in a definitive focal point. The pink fleshy tones that almost spill out at me; the way these beautiful images are absolutely grotesque. Contradicting the very standards of this society. “The disparity between the way women are perceived and the way they feel about their bodies.”

Saville paints women after plastinc surgery, women with marks on the parts that “should not be there,” women grabbing at the parts that “should not be there.” The same Jenny Saville, also paints pigs in slaughterhouses. She describes sketching at the slaughterhouses as a; I think she said, beautiful experience, or something along those grounds.