World Wall Canada: 2013

Collaborative art brings a range of people into conversations about their visions for their neighborhoods and their nations.
Finding a place for those ideas is the most challenging task for public artists in this time.

– Judy Baca

The World Wall: A Vision of the Future Without Fear is a traveling installation mural, which SPARC’s Artistic Director and UCLA Distinguished Professor Judith F. Baca conceived during the heightened arms race of the late eighties and early nineties. Because of its scale, international participation, and traveling exhibition nature, it is still a work in progress. Since its inception, both national and international artists have completed eight large-scale mural panels. The collective works, entitled the World Wall, travel to various countries fostering dialogue on contemporary issues of global concern: war, peace, cooperation, interdependence, environment and globalization.

International artists are asked to produce a new work 10x30ft that will travel with the World Wall after conducting dialogues in their home country, examining the contemporary moment in which the work is being made, and creating imagery of a vision for the future. In a sense artists act as visionaries for their country at a moment of change and creatively depict this vision for a world audience.

The World Wall is ultimately to be comprised of 14 individually themed and painted 10’ x 30’ canvas panels that, when installed, become a 100 foot diameter circle with 7 panels facing in and 7 panels facing out. The murals in a circular installation create an arena for public dialogue of global issues. Invited world artists will paint the 7 outer panels. Baca and her SPARC Team have been in the process of creating the seven interior panels of which, to date, she has completed four: “Triumph of the Hearts,” dealing with individual transformation and self examination inherent in the process of becoming an agent for peace; “Nonviolent Resistance,” that emphasizes nonviolent social change; “Balance,” a call for harmony between male and female, and between human beings and the Earth; and “Triumph of the Hands,” the necessary material transformation and economics of labor. This work is the counterpart to the spiritual transformation in “Triumph of the Hearts.”

The World Wall features four outer mural panels by international artists: “Alternative Dialogues,” from Finland, unveiled at the Meeting of the Worlds Conference in Joensuu, Finland, the Russian panel “The End of the 20th Century” unveiled at Gorky Park, Moscow, then the mural painted by an Israeli-Palestinian team entitled “Compromise/Inheritance,” was unveiled here in the United States and finally in Mexico City, the Mexican mural panel “Tlazolteotl: The Creative Force of the Unwoven” was unveiled. And now the Canadian artist team is working on theirs entitled “The Inuit Send the World a Canary.”