Judy Baca’s Great Wall Murals Get a ’60s Chapter at the Skirball

The Skirball Cultural Center, the Los Angeles museum, is opening a show that matters well beyond California’s borders. The 1960s — A Generation on Fire: Judy Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles puts two new, monumental mural sections on public view for the first time. For New Yorkers who follow public art and the long fight over who gets to tell a city’s history, it’s worth knowing about, even from three thousand miles away.

The Great Wall began in 1974, when Baca conceived it as a monument to the people of California. Her idea was a visual history of ethnic peoples from prehistoric times to the 1950s. In 1976, she co-founded the Social and Public Art Resource Center, known as SPARC. Working with 400 young people, along with artists, historians and community members, she painted the first section of what became a half-mile mural along the LA River.

The story didn’t stop at the 1950s. According to the Skirball’s announcement, Baca and SPARC have kept working to extend the mural to the present day. The new exhibition is the latest step in that effort, focused squarely on the 1960s. The recently completed sections on display are slated to be added to the existing mural later.

The show frames the decade through the Civil Rights Movement: the moral courage, peaceful protests and cultural awakening of the “generation on fire” who led the way. The Skirball describes the murals as treating history as a living, contested and shared narrative, one in which everyone takes part.

The murals don’t hang alone. They’re shown alongside Baca’s preparatory drawings and color studies, which let visitors see how the images were worked out before they became wall-size. An immersive video installation takes viewers to the banks of the LA River at the Tujunga Wash, the ultimate site for the murals. There’s also an interactive piece called MuralMemoirs, where visitors can share their own histories, extending the show’s idea that the story belongs to the people looking at it.

The exhibition unfolds in stages. According to the Skirball, individual mural sections will be revealed throughout the run, from October to December 2026 and again from January to February 2027. That staggered structure means the show looks different depending on when you go.

The Skirball is in Los Angeles, so this is a trip, not a transfer ride. But the project speaks to something New York knows well: murals on our own walls, from the Bronx to Bushwick, have long been how neighborhoods put their own version of events on the record. Baca’s decades-long, community-built mural is a reminder of how much work and how many hands that takes.