Coming of age in the late 1960s, Baca was active in Los Angeles’s anti-war, feminist, and Chicano civil rights movements. She knew she wanted to be a different kind of artist. “I somehow wanted my work to matter. I didn’t want to create work that went to white boxes,” she explained to me when we spoke. “I wanted to make work to go to where my family was and where my community was.” Baca began her studies at California State University Northridge in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, a six-day uprising precipitated by police violence against residents of the predominantly African American neighborhood (where Baca spent her early childhood). In 1970, a year after completing her BFA, she joined the Chicano Moratorium, which brought out massive numbers of Chicano protesters in opposition to the war in Vietnam and its disproportionate toll on the Chicano community.
https://hyperallergic.com/675296/how-judy-baca-redefined-the-intersection-of-art-and-activism/
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