A Conversation with Judy Baca, Artist, Educator, and Co-Founder, Social & Public Art Resource Center | SPARC, and Nora Halpern, Executive Director, LA28 Cultural Olympiad

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Artist-Endowed Foundation leaders will gather in Los Angeles in October for an in-person event presented by AEFI reflecting on artists, legacy, and philanthropy.

The program will feature a conversation with Judy Baca, Artist, Educator, and Co-Founder, Social & Public Art Resource Center | SPARC, and Nora Halpern, Executive Director, LA28 Cultural Olympiad.

This event is by invitation only.

Judy Baca, one of America’s leading visual artists, has been creating public art for four decades. Powerful in size and subject matter, Baca’s murals bring art to where people live and work. In 1974, she founded the City of Los Angeles’ first mural program, which produced over 400 murals and employed thousands of local participants, out of which grew an arts organization now known as the Social and Public Art Resource Center | SPARC. She continues to serve as SPARC’S artistic director and CEO and focuses her creative energy in the UCLA@SPARC Digital/Mural Lab, employing digital technology to promote social justice and participatory public arts projects. She is an emeritus Professor of the University of California Los Angeles, where she was a senior professor in Chicana/o Studies and World Art and Cultures Departments from 1980 until 2018.

Baca’s public arts initiatives reflect the lives and concerns of populations that have been historically disenfranchised, including women, the working poor, youth, the elderly, and immigrant communities, throughout Los Angeles and increasingly in national and international venues. Together with the people who live there, she co-creates monumental public art places that become “sites of public memory.” The Great Wall of Los Angeles, her most well-known work, is located in San Fernando Valley, spans half a mile, and in 2017 was added to the U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Register of Historic Places. Yet the Great Wall is still a work in progress, engaging another generation of youth in the mural-making process which over time has employed more than 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds, as well as artists, oral historians and scholars. Baca is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship, and over 50 awards from various community groups. In 2012, the Los Angeles Unified School District named a school located in Watts, her birthplace, the Judith F. Baca Arts Academy. 

Nora Halpern is Executive Director of LA28 Cultural Olympiad, which will accompany the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games being hosted by Los Angeles in 2028. Halpern has spent her public and private life advocating for the arts, artists, democracy, and justice. As a widely recognized curator and art historian, she has organized acclaimed exhibitions, collections, and public programs and advised leading artists, collectors, institutions, and corporations. As a prominent arts policy leader, she has taught and lectured internationally and has written extensively about art, artists, and cultural policy. Halpern served for over two decades as vice president at Americans for the Arts, focusing on policy issues related to the arts and their intersection with health, freedom of expression, equitable access, the environment, education, and technology, among other issues. She is a former member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities and a graduate of the Seminar on Strategy for Artist-Endowed Foundation leaders, conducted by the Aspen Institute Artist-Endowed Foundation Initiative | AEFI.

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