They very often would let me paint, you know, instead of doing some of the other lessons, because I didn't speak English well enough. So I had a lot … - Judy Baca

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...

I will hire anyone who has the will and the capacity and will put down a knife for brushes! The deal was, no violence. We had to enforce this; it was always a negotiation. The kids had to find other ways to express conflict.

What we need more now is to make art that is about connection. Mural painting is a perfect form, the oldest form, we know those cave guys were marking those walls for magic. Those guys were shamans who recorded history. I haven't traveled far from these ideas, that particular role, or consciousness, so that you can elevate your worries about global warming into a song that will move the souls of everybody in the room. This is a different and bigger role than the western European visions of art. This vision goes back to the ancient American. I like to say mural painting is a form made in connectedness, connected to architecture, to the river, where we made our first huge mistake in the city. We concreted the artery, and my job was to begin healing the river and the people. We are connected to that river, we are connected to living things, the whole planet, the Gaia, the large philosophical point of view, the creation of another idea of what can be.