Muralist Judy Baca has spent her career creating public art that tells the stories of communities too often left out of the historical record. Through SPARC—the Social and Public Art Resource Center—she has helped shape Los Angeles’ cultural landscape for nearly five decades. Her gallery production space at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica serves as the creative headquarters for the expansion of the The Great Wall of Los Angeles, one of the most ambitious and influential public art projects nationwide.

Standing in that space—surrounded by preparatory drawings, historical research, and the scale models that bring The Great Wall to life—we spoke with Baca about her upcoming collaboration with the LA Phil and the LA Phil’s own untold history: The orchestra’s founders included a gay man living as openly as the era allowed, Jewish artists fleeing Europe, and socialists who believed deeply in the democratization of great music.

“Those sound like our kind of people!” Baca said with a grin.

That shared ethos comes to life in The Great Wall of Los Angeles, a new symphony commissioned by the LA Phil and presented in collaboration with SPARC, premiering March 7, 2026 under the baton of Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel.  

Launched in 1974 with the participation to date of more than 400 young people from neighborhoods across Los Angeles, The Great Wall of Los Angeles is not simply a mural—it is a public monument, a civic history lesson, and a reclamation of stories erased by time and concrete. Painted directly along the channel walls of the Los Angeles River, the work currently chronicles the region’s history from prehistoric times through the 1950s “as seen through the eyes of women and minorities.”

Baca calls the artwork “a tattoo on the scar where the river once ran,” a direct reference to the US Army Corps of Engineers’ concreting of the river in the 1930s. But the metaphor extends further: If a river can be disappeared, so can the stories of the people who lived along its banks.

Like Baca’s landmark half-mile mural running through the Tujunga Wash, the symphonic project—led by Dudamel and composer-curator Gabriela Ortiz—seeks to tell a fuller history of Los Angeles and the people who built it, especially those omitted from official narratives. In paint or in sound, the work is ultimately about who gets remembered.

The next phase of the mural—spanning an additional 2,740 feet and depicting up to the 21st century—is underway, with plans to complete it in time for the 2028 Olympic Games. Young artists are being trained as the next generation of muralists, continuing the intergenerational, community-built ethos that defined the original work. 

Dudamel, whose tenure as Music & Artistic Director of the LA Phil concludes after the 2025/26 season, has described Los Angeles as “the city that raised me as an artist.” In that spirit, The Great Wall of Los Angeles event is both an homage and a tribute to Dudamel’s legacy. The concert features six works inspired by the mural and penned by composers with a connection to Southern California’s richly diverse history: Juhi Bansal, Nicolás Lell Benavides, Viet Cuong, Xavier Muzik, Estevan Olmos, and Nina Shekhar. The evening also presents an accompanying film by Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu.

Each composer focuses on a different section of the mural or the historical narrative behind it, drawing from stories that span centuries of life in California and Los Angeles.

These include the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island, whose solitary survival speaks to the erasure of Indigenous communities; the Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s, when hundreds of thousands—possibly as many as 2 million— people of Mexican descent were forcibly removed from the US; and moments of queer activism, including the founding in Los Angeles of the Mattachine Society, one of the nation’s earliest gay rights organizations.

The result is not a retelling of history but a refracting of it: a collection of personal, cultural, and sonic responses that merge into a shared civic memory.

Dudamel likens the symphonic project to Baca’s collaborative method: many small strokes, different hands, one collective story.

Though their tools differ—brushes and scaffolding versus bows and brass—SPARC and the LA Phil share core values: empowering young people, uplifting community histories, and affirming that art and music belong to the public.

While the symphonic work, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, premieres in March 2026 at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the mural continues to expand just miles away. Both works remind us that Los Angeles is a city still being written—and that its history is strongest when many hands hold the pen.

For more information about The Great Wall of Los Angeles mural and SPARC, visit SPARCinla.org.

Mural images courtesy of the SPARC Archives.