SPARC:  CREATING SITES OF PUBLIC MEMORY SINCE 1976

Founded in 1976 by muralist Judith F. Baca, painter Christina Schlesinger, and filmmaker Donna Deitch. The Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) is an arts center that produces, preserves and conducts educational programs about community based public art works. SPARC espouses public art as an organizing tool for addressing contemporary issues, fostering cross-cultural understanding and promoting civic dialogue. Working within this philosophical framework, SPARC has created murals and other forms of public art in communities throughout Los Angeles and increasingly in national and international venues.

SPARC is particularly committed to producing and promoting work that reflects the lives and concerns of America’s ethnically and economically diverse populations including: women, the working poor, youth, the elderly and newly arrived immigrant communities. Our ultimate purpose is to examine what we choose to memorialize through public art, and to innovate means which not only produce excellent art works but also provide a vehicle for the betterment of community through a citizens participatory process. SPARC's works are never simply individually authored endeavors, but rather a collaboration between artists and community members, resulting in art which rises from the community rather than being imposed upon it.

SPARC has three main areas of activity: production, education and preservation. Within these categories, each program, project and service reflects the organization’s role as a leading resource for public and community-based art. Underlying all of our activities is the profound conviction that the voices of our disenfranchised communities need to be heard and that our preservation of the commons is critical to creation of a civil society. SPARC has concentrated on using the creative process associated with the production of works of monumental proportions to develop models for the transformation of both physical environments and social environments in public spaces.

                      Christina Schlesinger                      Judy Baca                                  Donna Deitch

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