10/11/2026
Intentional Collaboration | Hispanic Heritage Month
From September 15 through October 15, we celebrate Latine artists and educators who proved that the most powerful art isn’t made alone. It’s made side by side, with communities, in public, and in service of one another.
Judith Baca, Chicana muralist and co-founder of SPARC (Social and Public Art Resource Center) in Los Angeles, brought professional artists and hundreds of young people together to paint The Great Wall of Los Angeles, a half-mile mural telling the histories that textbooks left out. Every brushstroke was a collaboration, and every young painter left knowing their community’s story was worth monumental scale.
Photo 1: Judith Baca - Photo from https://www.judybaca.com/about/
Judith Baca, Chicana muralist and co-founder of SPARC (Social and Public Art Resource Center) in Los Angeles, brought professional artists and hundreds of young people together to paint The Great Wall of Los Angeles, a half-mile mural telling the histories that textbooks left out. Every brushstroke was a collaboration, and every young painter left knowing their community’s story was worth monumental scale.
Photo 2: Favianna Rodriguez - https://favianna.com/
Amalia Mesa-Bains, Chicana installation artist, scholar, and educator, transformed the tradition of the home altar into museum-scale works of memory and devotion. Her scholarship helped the art world recognize what our communities already knew: that art made in and with community is serious, essential work.
Photo 3: Amalia Mesa-Bains - https://womenshistory.si.edu/blog/amalia-mesa-bains-creates-sacred-space-women-and-memory
Tato Laviera, Puerto Rican-born poet raised on the Lower East Side, helped shape the Nuyorican poetry movement that turned New York’s streets, cafes, and stoops into stages. In his hands, Spanish and English weren’t two languages competing but one voice speaking for a whole community.
Four artists. Four practices rooted in honoring each other’s lived experiences, talents, and communities. That’s what intentional collaboration looks like, and it’s the spirit our teaching artists and students bring into the learning spaces we share.
Who taught you
