That musical time is a way of like creating a rhythm within the piece. And it was an amazing experience for me to see how when lines, directional lin… - Judy Baca

(You have mentored so many young people. Who was a mentor for you?) Gilbert Roland, the actor. He was one of the first to break the notions of who a Mexican actor was. He was a silent movie star and was in the original talkies. He was the original Cisco Kid, a vaquero. He created the character of the gentleman who was a beautiful Latin lover, with a shot of whiskey and a rose in a vase on the bar. He would smell the rose before throwing back the whiskey. He had both tenderness and strength. Women's leadership can be both vulnerable and strong, that's the trick.

I was expanding the role of women in my own thoughts. I wanted to break all the rules. Women don’t build in massive scale, women don’t build monuments or make public art. Women play with dollhouses; they don’t make architectural statements, they don’t build Disney Hall. There is no financial backing for women to develop the agency of a Frank Gehry. Women will never have that power in my lifetime.

I'm interested in stepping outside the traditional role of arts, the creation of beautiful paintings bought by wealthy people to decorate their homes. People with expendable wealth could acquire art and determine who could see it. For me, art could go where my family went, in neighborhoods where museums are as foreign as the moon, so that working and poor people who had a great appreciation of beauty could see the murals and live with them. I was fighting a whole series of stereotypes...