The Great Wall of Los Angeles

**Style:** Monumental history muralism on concrete flood-control walls, cinematic in scale and narrative in structure. Its imagery moves from indigenous creation stories to modern social struggle, with realist figuration, activist symbolism, and community storytelling. **Authorship:** Designed by Judith Baca and executed beginning in 1978 with more than 400 community youth and artists through SPARC. **Historical context:** Officially titled *The History of California*, the mural was conceived as a corrective to exclusionary public history. It foregrounds communities and episodes often omitted from standard narratives, including migration, labor, internment, civil rights, and cultural change. The work is also a landmark of Chicano public art and collective mural practice. **Local flavor:** Set in the Tujunga Wash beside Valley College, it is pure Los Angeles in form and politics: infrastructure turned into memory, sun-bleached concrete transformed into a social archive.

Coldwater Canyon Avenue, Valley Glen, Los Angeles, CA, USA