We keep our tenderness alive
   and the nourishment of the
   earth green.
The heart is central as lava.
We burn in each other.
   We burn and burn.
We shout in choruses of millions.
We appear armed as mothers,
   grandmothers, sisters, warriors.

– From Doan Ket by Meridel Le Seuer

From my perch in the eagle's nest of the northwest, the uniqueness of my home in Los Angeles is easily visible. My summers in the Gulf Islands surrounded by Canadian women writers and artists have given me a perspective on our southern sprawl of a city and on what is truly American art by contrasts north and south. It is nearly 30 years ago now that three women artists wondered whether art could indeed change our world and opened, in an abandoned police station, the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) to provide a place for such experimentation.

It was the adage, "It takes only a single spark to create a prairie fire" that inspired Christina Schlesinger, an artist and daughter of the great American historian Arthur Schlesinger, to give us our name when she, along with independent filmmaker Donna Deitch and I, founded SPARC in 1976.

The arts in Los Angeles at that time were considered secondary to New York and San Francisco, and artistic production was firmly entrenched in a class-based division in which the work of women and people of color was considered "inferior," and "art for art's sake" was in favor. It was thought then that art should not challenge the wealthy collectors and established institutions with ethnically diverse aesthetics, political or social content. It was our intention as young artists and activists to transform Los Angeles neighborhoods by creating monuments that rose out of the dreams, aspirations and issues of the people, and to improve social conditions in those neighborhoods through the arts. I believed then, as I do now, in the transformative power of ideas, as long as they do not become calcified in convention and doctrine. SPARC has become a prairie fire, igniting thousands of sites of public memory in murals citywide, nationwide and across the globe.

In the early days at SPARC, I was a young woman artist who, by lucky accident or perhaps providence, met up with Minna Agins, an artist who, by the time I came to know her, was well into the last part of her life. She gave legs to ideas even though she had only one real one (the other leg, made of plastic, she called "Charley"). She was the wife of a blacklisted doctor, and was herself an organizer for the peace movement, accustomed to difficult challenges. She came with much experience to activism. A Russian Jewish artist born in Odessa, and trained in Matisse's workshop in Paris, she had organized for social security, marched in the bread lines, organized workers in the '30s. She carved wooden blocks to make her prints on the issues that so defined her life, all of which, essentially, expressed the depth of an individual's capacity for human compassion.

The eight-hour day, the minimum wage, the conservation of natural resources in the protection of our air, water and land, women's rights and civil rights, free trade unions, Social Security — all of these were launched as citizens' movements in which Minna participated along with others of her generation.

Minna would change my life as real mentors do. I met her in the studio of another artist, her lifelong friend, Marvin Grayson, who passed this year. I heard the wheels of a walker scraping across the pavement when Minna entered his studio that day — one hand grasping her tools, the other her walker. "These tools need sharpening," she proclaimed as she walked through the door. Minna had lost her leg to arterial sclerosis and had just come out of rehabilitation at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital, where she had learned to walk again on a prosthesis. It was a difficult setback for the printmaker, as she could no longer manage the large press in her studio alone. And it was the beginning of our deep friendship.

I offered space and help, and shortly thereafter Minna moved her studio to SPARC and was, for the last 15 years of her life, our daily companion. At SPARC she was surrounded by able-bodied young artists to help her print, and who loved to hear her stories. She provided much more to us in those years than our gift of space and able hands provided her. So often the greatest gift to an artist is simply those things — a place to work, a way to tell one's story. She provided the knowledge of an entire movement for justice that yielded the American social safety net, and the arts' role within it. This was essential grounding for us at SPARC who were embarking on a new course for the democratic transformation of the arts during the massive demographic changes from the '70s to the '90s in Los Angeles. We, too, would work alongside a movement for civil rights. This required understanding of the artistic precedents for our work in the art of mentors like Minna Agins, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The latter left the important legacy of the censored mural "America Tropical" in the historic pueblo of Los Angeles in 1931. This work, recently restored by the Getty Institute, will open to the public next year. Even as a whitewashed work it lived in our hearts. It was through the understanding of those who preceded us that true innovation occurred.

In the last year of her life, Minna worked with another woman, well into her nineties, the great poet of the plains, Meridel Le Sueur. They collaborated on a series of artworks combining Meridel's poetry and Minna's images, which they called "We keep our tenderness alive," from Meridel's poem Doan Ket. The two old women labored together to give voice and vision to the ideas they had worked a lifetime to support and strengthen.

Following the tradition of Los Tres Grandes, the great Mexican muralists of the 20th century, SPARC 's first project was the half-mile long Great Wall of Los Angeles, a mural about the ethnic history of our city to live on the wall of an aqueduct, a scar where the river once ran. In the Los Angeles flood control channel in the San Fernando Valley, 400 young people labored over a 12-year period under my direction, along with 40 participating artists representing the rich diversity of our city. Like a tattoo on the scar, we made a place for our stories to be told, and taught compassion by enabling the children to hear and value the stories and each other.

The children of the Great Wall are now grown, and a new generation begins interpreting their history on a virtual Great Wall broadcast on the Internet. The Wall's legacy continues — first, as a proposed mural on the Internet, and then as a painted mural continued on the site by the children of the Great Wall. Our dream is to watch as the world's longest mural is continued by the next generation of youth and artists interpreting their history. The Great Wall youth still connected to the project speak with the insight of adults about their experience working on the giant monument to interracial harmony 27 years later. The California Community Foundation provided support for the restoration of the first sections of the never-vandalized Wall, now in need of repair from the sun and weather, just as it helped support its initial production so many years ago.

The Great Wall productions spurred another initiative in the citywide murals of SPARC's Great Walls program, the Neighborhood Pride program, which concluded this year with its 109th mural. These murals speak to the multi-ethnic, multi-faith, and multi-centered aspects of our city.

"People often decry the lack of heart in the city of Los Angeles but Los Angeles has many hearts beating simultaneously and inexhaustibly!" says Pete Galindo, SPARC's Neighborhood Pride Public Art Director and my past student and mentee. Though Pete never met Minna, he is the beneficiary of her gifts, as we each in turn become mentors for the next generation of leadership in the arts. This is also an important service of the California Community Foundation — making mentorship possible.

Philanthropy is about hope and the belief that we can create a better world. This is what the funding of the arts by the California Community Foundation is doing, through its granting programs, when it gives the gift to an artist of "a place to work, a way to tell one's story." In doing so, the community foundation passes on the possibility of continuing mentorships, and provides the spark that can become the prairie fire. Through the arts we can hear each other's stories, and it is through hearing these stories and making them matter that "we keep our tenderness alive."

Judy Baca is founder and Artistic Director of SPARC (the Social and Public Art Resource Center), and a Professor of World Arts and Cultures Cesar Chavez Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Chicano/a Studies at the University of California in Los Angeles.