[NoHo Arts District, CA] – This month’s LA Art blog features a look at The Great Wall of Los Angeles at SPARC Bergamot Station, where sketches, unfinished panels, and global connections turn the mural into a living gallery.
At Bergamot Station, the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) has transformed its gallery space into something closer to a mural workshop in motion than a conventional exhibition. Under the banner From the Local to the Global: Great Wall and World Wall and the ongoing installation The 1960s: A Generation on Fire, the show is less about displaying a finished monument than about exposing its scaffolding. Visitors encounter The Great Wall of Los Angeles not as a static masterpiece but as a living, unfinished story.
One of the exhibition’s strongest qualities is its transparency. Rather than privileging the polished panels, SPARC’s Bergamot presentation places studies, sketches, transfer drawings, and color renderings beside mural segments. Large-scale works sit in dialogue with fragments and working notes, reminding audiences that public art of this magnitude is always the result of sustained collaboration and negotiation.
For many visitors, used to encountering The Great Wall only in its completed form along the Tujunga Wash, this demystification is revelatory. It emphasizes labor as much as vision: the hours of drafting, erasing, and re-imagining that precede the monumental image. The portion in progress will indeed join its sister in the wash.
The show takes a layered approach, moving from the original Great Wall (chronicling California’s histories from prehistory to the 1950s) into Judith Baca’s World Wall project (linking global movements for peace and justice), before projecting forward into the 1960s.
The unfinished panels of A Generation on Fire are particularly arresting. Even in their skeletal forms, they evoke civil rights marches, student activism, cultural ferment, and the fractures of that turbulent decade. The effect is not simply to recall the 1960s but to re-activate them, drawing clear lines of resonance with today’s struggles over racial justice, free speech, and state power.
By juxtaposing local memory with global solidarity, SPARC foregrounds the connective tissue between histories: how neighborhood struggles link to worldwide movements, and how art in one context can reverberate far beyond it.
The Bergamot presentation succeeds most when it leans into its provisionality. Seeing the unfinished wall, the viewer becomes aware of history as open text – one still being revised. Public programs and open-house events reinforce this ethos, positioning the gallery not as an endpoint but as a platform for dialogue.
Yet this approach also comes with tensions. The translation from riverbank to gallery inevitably sacrifices something of scale and context. The Great Wall’s outdoor presence – the expanse of concrete, the sky above, the sense of walking alongside history – cannot be fully replicated indoors. But in all fairness – the wash itself can’t host as many gallery goers as the indoor exhibition. No solutions, only tradeoffs.
What makes this exhibition vital is its refusal to treat The Great Wall of Los Angeles as a finished relic. Instead, it insists that history itself is still in progress. The Great Wall, conceived by Judith Baca and built with communities over decades, has always been about recovering voices excluded from dominant narratives. At Bergamot, that recovery is ongoing.
By coupling World Wall with new chapters of The Great Wall, the show articulates a vision of art as connective tissue: linking past to present, local to global, memory to possibility. It underscores that monuments can be porous, reversible, and responsive. These are qualities urgently needed in a moment when public memory is contested terrain.
SPARC’s Bergamot Station exhibition is less an art show than a civic rehearsal. It asks audiences to imagine how history might be pictured, to accept gaps as part of the narrative, and to see themselves as participants in the telling.
The experience is not seamless – it is jagged, incomplete, at times overwhelming. But that is precisely its strength. Like the mural itself, the exhibition embodies the messiness of collective memory, the unfinished work of justice, and the conviction that stories worth telling are never really over.
In inviting us behind the curtain, SPARC doesn’t diminish The Great Wall. It enlarges it – reminding us that the wall is not just something to look at, but something we are still building together.
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