Convenings

Past Learning Exchange Reports:
Los Angeles, November 15–17, 2002

Case Sessions: SPARC, Great Walls Unlimited

Part 1: Field trip to the site of the Caracen Mural

Present are Poet Rosanna Perez, Caracen executive director, Angela Sanbrano, and community members to talk about how this project has evolved, its meaning to the community, and how it relates to The Great Wall effort.

Part 2: SPARC Case Session: The Great Wall of Los Angeles and Great Walls Unlimited

A multimedia presentation focusing on SPARC’s inter-group efforts in three of fifteen communities&mdash: Koreatown, Watts, and Carecen—as part of the Great Walls Unlimited: Neighborhood Pride program.  SPARC talked about how its community education and design process in these communities, and use of internet technology, is creating the designs for the next four panels of The Great Wall of Los Angeles mural and generating public dialogue that furthers inter-group relations. Design for the final four sections, encompassing events from the last four decades of the century, has evolved through live and online dialogues. Using methodology developed by Judy Baca, scholars, designers, poets, activists, historians, students, and local residents have come together in dialogue forums to arrive at incidents and ideas they consider important to be represented in the mural. These will be articulated as imagery by Baca and a design team, and then taken back to the community and posted on SPARC’s website for further feedback.

Judy Baca (JB):Talks about their ADI Lab project, Great Walls Unlimited: Neighborhood Pride, and How dialogues at these three focus sites have informed production of the Great Wall. City Council has pledged $100,000 for restoration of the Great Wall.  With this restoration, we feel that it needs to be re-energized and re-dedicated, and the public needs to be educated... SPARC and Great Wall were begun when I was asked to take a look at the concreted-over Los Angeles River site. I concluded that by painting over this eyesore, it cold be said that “The Great Wall is a tattoo on the scar where the river once ran. People from different communities and different ethnic groups came together, to work together and spur dialogue in the creation of this mural.  What was unique about this process? Ways of knowing: academic research, popular culture imagery, lived experience, collected metaphors, expert and not-so-expert opinions. These were broken down into a series of prisms…age, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. There was a “visual talk through.” The Great Wall production period was 12 years. Over 1000 people worked on the production of the mural. 

Judy shows segments of Great Wall and explains metaphors.

The relationships formed with the kids are unique to this project: SPARC is looking to engage every segment from peer group and family up to federal government, in the relationships with these kids through this mural process.  The dialogues from these 80 different sites will result in metaphors and eventually images for the new view of The Great Wall.  How do the dialogues at these sites inform The Great Wall? First, they have to add the “prism of place.” SPARC has worked in 15 different communities and conducted more than 80 community meetings.  SPARC’s work does not end with the mural. For instance, with “Sites of Public Memory: The Prism of Place,” they conducted three case studies: San Fernando Valley, Watts, Caracen. Conducted dialogues in these places…discussion of some on the dialogues and what happened there and issues that were raised.  In each of these dialogues, there were issues that were contentious. These images and metaphors, stories about the movements and future of L.A., are the future of The Great Wall.