Judith Francisca Baca (born September 20, 1946) is an American artist, activist, and professor of Chicano studies, world arts, and cultures based at the University of California, Los Angeles.

She is the co-founder and artistic director of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, California.

[5]: 22  Her grandmother was an herbal healer and practiced curanderismo,[5]: 22  which profoundly influenced her sense of indigenous Chicano culture.

"[5]: 23  After completing graduate school, Baca continued her education, studying muralism at La Tallera in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

[5]: 26 In Raspados Mojados Baca used a street vendor cart as a sculptural installation to address immigration issues and the misrepresentations of Mexicans living in the United States.

[6] Los Angeles street vendors constantly sell ice cream as well as Mexican snacks, fruit cocktails, corn on the cob, and raspados.

She had lookouts who would signal the mural team if rival gang members were headed toward the work site, or if the police were coming.

In one case, when the city objected to a mural that showed people struggling with police, they threatened to stop funding the program if Baca did not remove it.

Bringing youth together to create art left a lasting impression in Los Angeles, shifting Chicano/a culture.

The involvement of poor youth of color in Baca's artistic processes changed the way white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal culture perceived their place in society.

In 1988 Mayor of Los Angeles Tom Bradley commissioned her to create the Neighborhood Pride Program, a citywide project to paint murals.

The project employed over 1,800 at-risk youth and has been responsible for the creation of over 105 murals throughout the city.In 1996 she created La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra ("Our Land Has Memory") for the Denver International Airport.

The mural's intent was "not only to tell the forgotten stories of people who, like birds or water, traveled back and forth across the land freely, before there was a line that distinguished which side you were from, but to speak to our shared human condition as temporary residents of the earth...The making of this work was an excavation of a remembering of their histories.

It is located at San Jose State University and has portrait mosaics of Cesar Chavez, Mahatma Gandhi, Robert F. Kennedy, and Dolores Huerta.

[4] Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) was founded in 1976 by Judy Baca, artist/teacher Christina Schlesinger, and filmmaker/director Donna Deitch.

And that’s exactly what happened.”[13] Judy Baca was hired by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to help improve the area around a San Fernando Valley flood control channel called the Tujunga Wash.

"[5]: 29-30 Baca was inspired by Los tres Grandes ("The Three Greats"), a novel about three of the most influential Mexican muralists: Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco.

When she returned and began this project, Baca made the explicit decision to involve people from the community that represented voices that have been historically marginalized.

At the beginning of the mural project in 1976, Baca, with funding through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), began work with nine other artists, five historians, and 80 young people who had been referred to the program by the criminal justice department.

Some of the events portrayed in the mural constituted the first time they had ever been displayed in public, including but not limited to the Dust Bowl Journey, Japanese American internment during World War II, Zoot Suit Riots, and the Freedom Bus Rides.

Working with young people was important for Baca because she noticed that many of them who were involved in gangs were also using graffiti to express themselves and claim territory.

Baca felt that muralism was one way to redirect these young people's energy and build community through positive experiences.

[16]: 88 Even though Baca made a lot of progress in building community with gang involved young people, she struggled with how gendered muraling projects and spaces were.

[5]: 31  By the end of the project, the mural measured half a mile in length (2,754 feet),[17] and had provided over 400 people with employment and leadership development opportunities.

The project is proposed to continue until the mural reaches about a mile in length so that it may portray not only contemporary times, but also a vision of the future.

[5]: 31  She also served as a professor at California State University, Monterey Bay from 1994 to 1996, where she co-founded the Visual & Public Arts Institute Department.

In 1993, she co-founded UCLA's Cesar Chavez Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, an institution for which she serves as vice chair.

She was also part of a group that successfully preserved her mural, Danza Indigenas, in Baldwin Park, after there were violent protests and vandalism towards the artwork.

Body a scholarly organized group exhibition on the contributions and experiences of Chicano artists to the art historical canon.

The show was curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Marissa Del Toro, and Gilbert Vicario, and the accompanying catalog was published by the Chicago University Press.